'Pak Topo' became a well-known disaster spokesman in a country with 127 active volcanoes
the government asked him and he turned the job down, not wanting to become a mouthpiece for them; but in the end they pressed him, and in 2010 Sutopo Purwo Nugroho became the new spokesman for Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation Agency . Almost his first job was to persuade 350,000 people to move away from Mount Merapi on the island of Java. The great, stately, active volcano had been monitored for a long time.
So first of all he provided clarity, turning data from monitors on the ground into clear statements to the press. There were plenty of those, and 500 press releases in 2018 alone. Then he did some educating. He filled thebuilding with dioramas, mud-crusted relics from landslides, notices tipped sideways and backdrops of devastation into which visitors could insert themselves, as rescuers, for selfies. He shrugged off the occasional government grumble about being “too naughty”.
For those who wanted them, he tweeted challenging scientific facts: diagrams of volcanoes changing shape before they erupted, and a long thread about volcanic mud. He was not a volcanologist, leaving that job to academic monitors in airless sheds at the foot of uneasy mountains; his training was in hydrology, and he had wasted many years at another agency trying to make rain.
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