We Called It a Natural Disaster. It Wasn’t.

Over 1,100 dead. Three million displaced. And the uncomfortable truth about what really killed them.

4 min read

Just now

November 2025. In just a few days, more than a thousand lives were lost across Sumatra — from Aceh to West Sumatra. Flash floods and landslides swept through villages, burying homes, washing away families, and leaving behind a devastation so complete that satellite images could barely capture the scale of it.

The media called it a natural disaster.

But a scientist from one of Indonesia’s most prestigious universities used a different term. He called it the accumulation of “ecological sins.”

That phrase has stayed with me. Because it suggests something deeply uncomfortable: that what happened wasn’t just an act of nature. It was a consequence — a bill coming due after decades of choices we made, or allowed to be made on our behalf.

Let me give you the numbers, because numbers matter.

The official death toll: 1,138. Missing: 163. Injured: over 7,000. Displaced: nearly one million people. Affected: 3.3 million lives across three provinces.

Yes, there was extreme weather. Tropical Cyclone Senyar formed unusually close to the equator — a rare meteorological…