Survivors of severe flooding in Aceh Tamiang say emergency tents from Indonesia’s national disaster agency appeared only hours before President Prabowo Subianto arrived for an inspection visit last week, despite families having taken shelter on a bridge for more than seven days.
Residents along the Sungai Tamiang bridge in Kuala Simpang described living in makeshift shelters, crowding multiple households into a single tarpaulin tent while waiting for aid. Dozens of BNPB-branded tents were suddenly erected on Wednesday, two days before the president landed in the area.
“We’ve been here a week. The tents came an hour ago.”
Amri, one of the displaced residents, said the agency’s tents were put up barely an hour before journalists arrived on Wednesday.
“We’ve been on this bridge for more than a week,” he told local reporters. “On the first days we had to squeeze into other people’s tents. The BNPB tents only came just now—about an hour ago.”
In the privately erected tent he previously shared, four families had been sleeping side by side. Residents compared the scene to “fish packed into storage crates,” with more than a dozen people lying shoulder-to-shoulder each night.
Once BNPB arrived with official tents, each family was finally given its own shelter. Amri called the new conditions “much better,” though he said water and blankets remained in short supply.
“We’re grateful. It’s better now,” he said. “We just need blankets and clean water for cooking.”
Water Still a Long Walk Away
Despite the new tents, many evacuees say they still have to walk far to collect water whenever a tanker passes the bridge. Amri urged authorities to install a more permanent water point on the site.
“We need a water tank here,” he said. “Fetching water is too far, especially for children and the elderly.”
“We built our own tents for a week”
Another evacuee, Suriani, echoed the account that BNPB only set up tents shortly before the president’s scheduled visit.
“This BNPB tent is new. It just arrived,” she said. “Before this we built our own shelters.”
Suriani’s old tent held seven families, with more than a dozen people sheltering inside. Like others, she said the new arrangement, one tent per household, was a major improvement, though it raised questions about the timing of the agency’s response.
Pressure on Government Response
The late arrival of official tents has reignited criticism of the government’s disaster response in Aceh and North Sumatra, where floods and landslides have displaced tens of thousands. President Prabowo’s trip on Friday was intended to reassure residents that the central government was coordinating recovery efforts.
But for displaced families on the Sungai Tamiang bridge, the sudden flurry of activity hours before the presidential convoy arrived has fuelled perceptions that aid was delayed until it would be publicly visible.
“We have been here since the floods came,” Amri said. “We just want help to reach us as quickly as possible, not only when someone important is coming.”
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