Lessons from Indian Ocean tsunami disaster still to be learnt

Citation

Mulligan, M. and Nadarajah, Y. (2011), "Lessons from Indian Ocean tsunami disaster still to be learnt", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 2 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijdrbe.2011.43502aab.001

Lessons from Indian Ocean tsunami disaster still to be learnt

Article Type: News items From: International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Volume 2, Issue 1

Introduction

The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 sent shock waves all around the world because it caused heavy loss of life and so much damage within local communities spread across four different nations. Indeed, global interest in the way that the affected communities might recover from such a disaster continued for up to five years after the waves struck. Of course, there has been a string of big natural disasters in the period since the tsunami and, arguably, the devastating floods in Pakistan and the massive earthquake in Haiti – both occurring in 2010 – have been even more costly and have posed even bigger challenges in regard to relief and rehabilitation work. It is not surprising that global interest in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami has now subsided but, sadly, there is little evidence to suggest that governments and humanitarian aid agencies around the world have really learnt the lessons from the strengths and weaknesses of the post-tsunami recovery efforts. As a result, avoidable mistakes are undoubtedly being made in the international disaster relief and recovery efforts underway in both Pakistan and Haiti.

Significant evaluations of the post-tsunami aid and rehabilitation effort began to appear in 2007. It was the biggest global relief and rehabilitation effort in history and much interest centred on the fact that local communities in most of the affected countries had been totally unprepared for such a disaster. Over 500 international aid agencies were involved in recovery efforts in Sri Lanka alone (Silva, 2009) and so interest also focused on the capacity of the growing global aid “industry” to respond to large-scale disasters. The Tsunami Evaluation Centre based in London was responsible for one of the main evaluations of the relief and rehabilitation effort and it was able to conclude that the world had learnt much from the experience in regard to effective relief and infrastructure repair (Cosgrave, 2007; Telford and Cosgrave, 2007). However, it also suggested that not enough had been done to put affected communities in the “driving seat” of the recovery work and this sentiment has been echoed by other evaluations (Hettige, 2007; Kilby, 2007; Kenny, 2010).

Of course, there is nothing easy about repairing and replacing shattered infrastructure on a huge scale, especially when disasters strike communities that had poor or inadequate infrastructure beforehand. However, social recovery is even less tangible and harder to get right and the authors were involved in a major study related to social recovery from the tsunami disaster in both Sri Lanka and India, which has only recently been reported (www.rmit.edu.au/gloablism/publications/reports).

The study

The study was conducted by a team of researchers from both RMIT University and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and it involved ten local fieldworkers as well. The fieldwork was conducted in four different case study areas in Sri Lanka and in the northern part of Chennai, India, where tsunami survivors from eight coastal squatter settlements were relocated into new permanent housing several kilometres inland from the sea. In Sri Lanka, the fieldwork was conducted in the following areas:

1. 1.

   The area centred on the village of Seenigama, in South-West Sri Lanka, where a local community-based NGO called Foundation of Goodness led the relief and recovery efforts.

2. 2.

   The area centred on urban Hambantota in South-Eastern Sri Lanka, where Tamil-speaking Muslims and Sinhalese Buddhists have lived in relative harmony for hundreds of years.

3. 3.

   The area centred on an ancient Hindu temple at Thirukkovil, in the south-eastern province, where the local community is almost entirely made up of Tamil-speaking Hindus.

4. 4.

   The area centred on a large and historic mosque at Sainthamuruthu in the south-eastern province, where the local community is almost entirely made up of Tamil-speaking Muslims.

In India, the researchers were particularly interested in disaster recovery work in low-caste, vulnerable communities while in Sri Lanka there was a focus on how the disaster might affect communities that could easily be divided along ethnic lines or otherwise feel, with good reason, that they did not receive fair treatment in regard to the national disaster-recovery effort.

The study found that many avoidable mistakes were made in the planning and construction of resettlement villages for disaster survivors, largely because this work was rushed and carried out with inadequate co-ordination or supervision and one of the seven research reports focuses on lessons learnt in regard to housing disaster survivors (see report by Iftekar Ahmed and Judith Shaw). Similarly, the study also found that not enough thought was put into strategies for rebuilding a sustainable coastal tourism industry in tsunami-affected areas in Sri Lanka (see the research report by Dave Mercer). However, the major findings of the study as a whole relate to mistakes that were made in regard to rebuilding viable household livelihoods in affected communities and in trying to put affected communities into the “driving seat” of the rehabilitation work (see separate reports by Judith Shaw and by Martin Mulligan and Yaso Nadarajah). The authors (Mulligan and Nadarajah) have written a paper on post-disaster community development that will soon be published in the International Community Development Journal.

It is important to note that the researchers did not only focus on mistakes and weaknesses in the relief and rehabilitation efforts in the five case study areas and, indeed, we went in search of examples of good practice. Most of the examples of good practice that we were able to highlight involved effective partnerships between local, community-based organisations and international aid agencies. In this regard, the work of the Foundation of Goodness at Seenigama was particularly instructive, as was the role of several community-based organisations at Hambantota. The research reports also highlight the effective work of the Taiwanese Tzu Chi Foundation at Hambantota and the efforts made by the Sri Lankan NGO Sri Lanka Solidarity to design a model village at Hambantota. Rather unexpectedly, the researchers also found that a Sri Lankan organisation with no prior experience in disaster recovery work – the Colombo-based People’s Church – showed an aptitude for implementing community-development strategies in constructing a new settlement for 150 displaced families near Thirukkovil. This last example suggests that aptitude is even more important that prior experience in finding a way to rebuild resilient local communities in the wake of a big disaster.

While the seven separate but related research reports amount to 385 pages in all, readers may be relieved to hear that there is a rather brief overview report that sums up the key findings of the study as a whole.

Martin Mulligan, Yaso Nadarajah