THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The people of the United States have pronounced inclination to focus on their own wonderfulness and ignore the balance of the planet. While the US was focused on the job interview of a clearly unfit judicial nominee, disaster was happening in Indonesia.

The preparations for a beach festival were underway, with dancers and other performers gathering by the sea, when an enormous tsunami triggered by a strong earthquake swept over the eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi on Friday evening.

The twin disasters — a 7.5-magnitude earthquake, and the swirling wall of water it unleashed — killed at least 384 people in the city of Palu, the site of the festival, and destroyed thousands of buildings there, including a shopping mall, a hotel, seaside restaurants, beachfront homes and several mosques.

“We have found corpses from the earthquake as well as bodies swept up by the tsunami,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the Indonesian disaster agency, said in a television interview.

Indonesian officials were preparing for a sharp rise in the death toll because search and rescue teams had yet to reach populous coastal settlements near Palu. Vice President Jusuf Kalla of Indonesia told a local news website that thousands may have died, with an unknown number washed out to sea.

Although Indonesia is chronically at risk of tsunamis, Andri Manganti, a resident of Palu who lost his home in Friday’s earthquake, said that no warning siren sounded before the tidal wave — estimated by officials to be a towering 18-feet high — struck the city. Text messages that were supposed to warn locals of a possible tsunami were foiled because cellphone towers had been downed by the earthquake, Mr. Sutopo said.

Indonesia’s meteorological and geophysics agency is facing criticism for having lifted its tsunami warning little more than half an hour after the earthquake struck. It is not yet clear whether the wave that was described by Mr. Sutopo as around 18 feet in height struck before or after the tsunami warning was lifted.

Cellphone video reported to have been taken in Palu showed a wave crashing over the roofs of one-story buildings, which then disappear beneath the turbulent water.

The video starts by showing that coastal buildings and a major street were already flooded, indicating that an initial wave had already hit the coast. Then, a large wave can be seen rolling toward the shore.

As the wave struck, people on top of the building shouted and scrambled to get away. The water surged around a mosque, whose large green dome had collapsed, probably from the quake.

It is still far too early to know the toll of this latest disaster but the immediate future does not look good. Fortunately Americans have The Orange Humperdoo to distract the,.