Jakarta Bombings

Let me start by saying that my family and I are safe and were never in any danger. Like most of Jakarta, we are a little bit on edge. With the exception of avoiding crowded, public places (like malls and restaurants) over the three day weekend, we are not planning on altering our activities.

For all of us, the day started like any other, and I think that is what contributes to the sense of unease. I was at work by 6 AM, my wife and daughter were up and preparing for a day at school. At 7:45 AM, I was on the phone with my boss in Phoenix. Hearing loud "booms" in my office are pretty common. Large trucks drive by or through the alleys around our building, bounce over speed bumps, and the noise carries. When I heard the loud boom and felt my building shake, I stood up and looked out the window. The boom was louder than normal, and the building had never shaken before. When I saw nothing out of the ordinary outside - people walking calmly, kids still playing soccer - I figured it was nothing.

At 8 AM, I had a meeting in my office. About 8:10, a colleague who is our floor warden for emergencies interrupted the meeting and said we had an emergency and I needed to talk with her right now. That's when I found out that two bombs had gone off in the Kunigan district near the JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels.

Our first response was to call and account for the safety of all our employees. Half my staff was either on site or en route. A few of my staff, who travel by the hotels on their way in, missed the explosions by less than five minutes.

Once we had accounted for everyone, we started scouring the Internet. I was at a disadvantage as all the local - bahasa only - sites had the news first. English language sites - CNN, Yahoo, MSNBC - didn't have anything posted until about 45 minutes after the first Indonesian site. While surfing, I phoned my wife and told her to keep our daughter home from school. Then I called my parents to let them know I was safe, and sent an email out to the rest of the family delivering the same message.

As you can imagine, any moment of free time throughout the day was spent reading the news updates about the incident. It's situations like these that show just how useful and powerful the Internet can be. It was fascinating to watch the stories evolve as more information became available. Initial reports were of the bombing and of known casualties. Updates soon included where the bombs exploded, where the victims were from, eye witness accounts. One site even had a list of 15 names who had been injured.

Around 10 AM, our company sent out a memo with an update on the incident - a busy week for our internal communications team. The memo explained what had happened and informed us that two of our employees were hurt in the blast. Several people have told me who they are and what the injuries are - non-life threatening - but, as they haven't been confirmed (and our company VP is not telling the press citing company policy), I won't repeat them here.

I was surprised both by my reaction and that of my employees and colleagues. My mind absorbed the situation calmly and with clarity of thought. My body began showing signs of stress, and still does as I type this 12 hours later. I can feel the bile in my stomach and the cortisone in my muscles. My staff, after confirming their family was safe, more or less took it in stride. When a rumor circulated that management was having us go home, some asked if it was mandatory or if they could continue working. To some extent, I felt the same way. I felt very safe in my office, and wasn't sure if being in a car, stuck in heavy traffic, was very safe.

Many people started talking about the last time there were bombings. The target that time was the Australian Embassy, which is directly across the street from our office. That was a car bomb that wiped out every window in the front of our building, and half the windows down the alleyway. Our windows are now "bomb resistant" as a result. The cleanup of that bombing included the discovery of pinkie fingers embedded in the ceiling tiles on the twelfth floor of our building. Anyone who was in an office that faced the street was badly injured.

Our primary meeting room, with video conferencing, faces the street. My office is at the rear of the building, as far away from the street as you can get. My office doubled as a meeting room for the day.

I continue to watch the story develop, but I'm very cautious about what to believe. If the current media-caused recession has taught us anything, it is that the media presents what it wants to, not necessarily the truth. Having seen the press in Singapore and Jakarta, I can tell you that the Western press does anything it can to scare people, while other papers tend to be more balanced in the types of stories they report. So, expect the Western media to tell you that this was an attack on Westerners, Western interests, intended to combat the Western way of life. This is what I'm seeing at this point, anyway.

I've seen reports blaming Muslim extremists. The newly elected President of Indonesia had a different perspective in the news conference he held at the site of the bombings. According to my driver, who watched the speech on TV, the President accused one of the opposing candidates of coordinating the attack to discredit him politically. This candidate, apparently, was a general at the time the military looted and raped wealthy Chinese in the late 90's (I spoke of this on one of my prior blogs). Interesting political candidates they have here. I have seen no reports of this in Western media.

I'm sure other conspiracies will surface. Possibly even one that says the President coordinated the effort so he could blame his political rival. Anything is possible. Bottom line, don't believe any guesses, conjecture, or theories at this point. They will only scare you.

The two hotels attacked - JW Marriott and Ritz Carlton - are the two hotels I've stayed at before I lived here. I've eaten in both restaurants that were the targets. My family and I ate breakfast every morning in the lobby buffet at the JW Marriott when we stayed there waiting for our housing on our move out here.

Many of the news reports have commentary from people who have stayed at the hotels that they are surprised these attacks could happen there. I share this perspective. I've made several comments on this blog on how tight the security is. They examine every car, they examine every person. It's like screening to board a plane just to enter the building. How anyone brought explosives into these hotels is just amazing to me.

That said, it was just two weeks ago when my wife and I had commented to each other how perfunctorily the security teams performed their tasks. One of the tasks is to walk around the entire car with a mirror and look underneath to see if there is a bomb. On several occasions, we've seen the person make the trip around the car without ever actually looking at the mirror. Often, if they see a foreigner in the car, they won't even inspect it. I don't think they will be so lax any longer - at least not in the immediate future.

I left the office a little earlier than normal, but not much. The building security is requiring us to enter and leave from the rear and have our badges visible at all times in the building. The drive home took 20 minutes. For the most part, the streets were empty. I've never seen so few cars on this road at that time of day. I've also never seen so many police officers. Every corner, every light, had four or five officers directing traffic. I felt very safe driving home, except when we had to stop. With the terrorist's proclivity for car bombs, being stuck in a pack of cars and motorcycles with no way out was not exactly what I was hoping for on my drive home.

My wife said that our neighborhood had been eerily quiet all day, too. No one was walking the streets, no one was at the park. The drive home, and the feel in the neighborhood, reminded me of when we had the Phoenix Sniper killings near my neighborhood. The streets usually busy every morning with walkers transformed into a ghost town. I think the malls and restaurants of Jakarta will be that way for several weeks to come. My driver told me that there were reports of an undetonated bomb in a building we drive by on our way to Hacienda. That's why we ordered take out for dinner tonight.

The latest news reports coming in while I've written this indicate that the bombers were staying in room 1808 at the JW Marriott. I've actually stayed in that exact room.

I'll continue to keep everyone posted.