Coastal Processes, Hazards, and Society

2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

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2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

Introduction

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which we covered in Module 7, provides us with a case study to help understand how levels of sensitivity and adaptive capacity affected the level of impact and the recovery of the communities in the tsunami’s path.

The massive earthquake and tsunami that occurred on December 26, 2004, off the coast of Indonesia, was one of the most damaging disasters in recorded history. It caused at least 230,000 deaths and billions of dollars in damages in countries bordering the Indian Ocean. The tsunami impacted many countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, and Somalia. Of the people who lost their lives, many vacationing westerners were included.

Following this severe hazard event, damages were unevenly distributed throughout the affected regions. The reasons for this inequity are complex and include variations in all three dimensions of vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Let’s look at sensitivity and adaptive capacity.

Sensitivity

Variations in sensitivity were one of the major factors, driven by variability in economic resources and demographic factors.

Tsunami animation. waves go out east and west and lose power the further they go.
Animation of Indian Ocean Tsunami Wave Propagation.
Credit: NOAA: Indonesia Tsunami: NOAA Center for Tsunami Research (NCTR) produced the animation.
Sri Lanka and housing sensitivity:

One heavily affected country was Sri Lanka, where 0.17% of the entire national population was killed and 2.5% were displaced. The Sri Lankan scholar Mohan Munasinghe observed that houses belonging to poorer individuals that were in the path of the tsunami were more likely to be destroyed due to the low quality of construction, suggesting a higher sensitivity of the physical property of poorer people. One clear way of reducing sensitivity to tsunamis in Sri Lanka would be stricter housing construction requirements at the coast. However, Sri Lanka is a poor country with limited economic resources, which could make implementing and enforcing such requirements difficult.

Utterly demolished seaside residences.
Devastation in Sri Lanka Following the 2004 Tsunami.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons[Public domain]

Adaptive Capacity

Importance of traditional family community networks for enhancing adaptive capacity:

Many community members in developing nations, despite lacking in economic resources, have access to strong traditional family and community networks. These networks are valuable, if not essential, for recovery by providing informal mutual help following a disaster, like a tsunami. In the case of Sri Lanka, Munasinghe noted that these networks improved survivors’ ability to cope with and recover from the disaster compared to wealthier groups. Therefore, in this instance, informal social ties reduced community sensitivity to the hazard event. This is an example of adaptive capacity, which will be described in a subsequent section.


Learning Check Point


Two images: before tsunami, versus after tsunami, when half of the area is submerged and everything in remaining dry area is destroyed.
Two images showed the strong impact of the 2004 Asian Tsunami at Banda Aceh, Indonesia. The upper image was taken in June 2004, while the lower image was taken in December 2004, right after the tsunami happened.

Economic Recovery and Adaptive Capacity

Anthropogenic factors can sometimes exacerbate the losses from a natural hazard like a tsunami. Economic development patterns of South Asian coasts played a part in 2004, including tourist developments and shrimp farms, which had negatively impacted coral reefs and mangroves that otherwise might have diminished the intensity and inland reach of the tsunami. In some communities, the reliance on these types of economic development have limited local livelihood options to tourism-related or fishery-related jobs, instead of more traditional, diversified livelihood strategies. The damages to tourism and fisheries industries following the tsunami placed greater stress on communities that were heavily dependent on jobs in these sectors. Consequently, it was harder for local people in these communities to recover from the tsunami because of damages and the lack of other livelihood options.

Despite the widespread damage, some communities suffered less or recovered more quickly because they possessed higher adaptive capacities to this hazard event. One study found that fishing communities on Simeulue Island, Indonesia, and Surin Island, Thailand had fewer losses from the tsunami because they possessed traditional knowledge of tsunamis and had institutions in place that helped them prepare for and respond to the disaster.

Around the Indian Ocean basin, there were no early warning systems when the tsunami struck. In response to the disaster, governments almost immediately collaborated to develop the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System to reduce exposure to tsunamis. This aspect will be discussed further in Module 11.