The walls of the command post feature photographs of the only other major initiative taken by the Padang city government: mass prayers at which local cleric and businessman Boy Lestari led three hour-long chants imploring God to spare the city. "There is no better way to prevent a tsunami from happening but to bring yourself closer to Allah," says Lestari, who doesn't believe in the scientists' forecast. "No scientist can predict when a disaster will strike. It is in the hands of God. As long as the sounds of people chanting still reverberate on earth God will postpone the doomsday even, let alone a tsunami."

Padang's mayor Fauzi Bahar says his administration is taking steps to prepare the city's population for a tsunami; including classroom drills for students and the distribution of leaflets showing the location of places of refuge such as tall buildings. But he says that regular evacuation drills and other such practices have a downside: they "add to people's anxiety and fear. That's why I reduced the volume of the alarms so that people aren't too scared. In March, when people's concern was at the highest, there was an exodus of 60% of people from the city. How long can you live that way?"

Some Padang residents have already decided they won't. Real estate agents say that the prices of homes near the shore have halved since the beginning of the year, while the value of buildings on higher ground has shot up. The Nias quake and several heavy aftershocks in early April sent tens of thousands of Padang residents scrambling for the hills, causing massive traffic jams on the main roads leading out of the city. One of those caught in the congestion was 64-year-old Walini. The mother of six was attending a ceremony marking the seventh month of pregnancy for her youngest daughter. "Dishes and glasses flew into the air and we ran out of the house petrified," she recalls. "It lasted less than one minute, but it felt like forever for me." That was enough for Walini, who decided on the spot to abandon her home of nearly 50 years and move her entire family to a rented house on higher ground. The 30-minute drive took three hours because of the crowds fleeing the city. "Since the Aceh earthquake the sound of the waves in my old house kept me awake all night," says Walini. "Now, after moving, I can sleep again."

Mujono, who heads the neighborhood association that covers Walini's old house, says that 15 out of the 60 families that used to live there have moved out. Some people ran as far as Solok, 60 km away. But they were forced to flee back to Padang the next day, Mujono says, after a nearby volcano suddenly erupted. He shrugs. "You can't escape."

Others in the city are less fatalistic. A group of academics, doctors and businesspeople have set up the Tsunami Alert Society. The group aims to educate the populace about the dangers of an inundation and organizes training and equipment needed to minimize the potential loss of life. "Our target is to get people to realize that living in Padang means they have to know what to do if there is a tsunami," says Febrin Anas Ismail, dean of the Engineering Faculty at Andalas University in Padang. "Just like when you are about to fly on a plane, you should know that you have to fasten your seat belt and so on."

So far, the group has carried out three evacuation drills, one of which saw 3,000 people walk to high ground in half an hour, about the time scientists estimate it will take before a tsunami hits if an earthquake comes. "Our aim is to carry out a general evacuation drill for the whole city by the end of the year," Febrin says. The group's members say they have received nothing from the local government except permission to carry out the drills. "The government prefers to calm people down rather than prepare them for the worst," says civil servant Hediyanto Husaini. "There's no sense of emergency despite the scientists' serious warnings. They won't do anything until people get killed in hundreds of thousands."

Calf-deep in a muddy field outside the village of Maligi north of Padang, Charles Rubin and two colleagues are doing their best to make sure that never happens. They hope to use the geological record to measure the size and frequency of previous tsunamis that have hit the west coast of Sumatra. Rubin raises a meter-and-a-half-long steel shaft above his head and plunges the sharpened end downward. As a score of curious villagers watch, he twists the shaft and then slowly extracts it. About a meter of the pole is cut away, leaving only a semi-circular channel, now filled with a cored-out column of earth. Using a pocket knife, Rubin scrapes the round surface of the core flat, exposing a cross-sectional view of the field's geological history for the last thousand or so years. In between two layers of pulpy dark-chocolate-brown peat is a distinct band of grey about two centimeters wide.

"This looks like sand to me," Rubin says excitedly. "It's definitely a candidate for dating." He pokes gently at the grey material, its flaky granular composition visibly distinct from the compost-like peat around it. Carbon-14 dating will determine to within about 50 years when the sand was laid down. If it coincides with one of the big three Padang earthquakes in the past 700 years, Rubin and his team will seek to calculate the size of the tsunami from the thickness of the band of sand.

"If we can find out how big the past tsunamis were, then we can go a long way to letting people living here know what to expect," Rubin says with satisfaction. "We may even discover they were all only in the one- or two-meter range," agrees Sieh. "Or even that there were no tsunamis at all after the earthquakes. Wouldn't that be wonderful?" It would. But for Sumatra's long-threatened people, the past portends a worrying future.

With reporting by Zamira Loebis/Padang

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