When the violent shaking from a massive magnitude 7.5 earthquake finally stopped, Selvi Susanti stood up and realized something strange was happening. First, she saw the ground suddenly begin to sink.
Then the pavement split beneath her feet like a broken dinner plate and started to rise. Terrified, she clung to a small sliver of asphalt and surfed a river of fast-moving mud as it swallowed entire neighborhoods, carrying her higher than coconut trees for a quarter of a mile.
"What I saw oh my God! Houses were tumbling. They started to roll like waves. It's like a tsunami, but the difference was they were waves of soil," said Susanti, 38, weeping at the memory of seeing so many people simply disappear into the earth as they screamed for help. "It felt like I was in a boat, moving around. But the difference is
"I knew right away," said Prasetya, co-founder of the Tsunami Research Center Indonesia, who had met with government officials and residents in the area to try to raise awareness about the threat. "I posted in our group, and I said, 'It's happened.'"