Review of impact of post-tsunami reconstruction and rehabilitation of infrastructure facilities

On 26 December 2004, an earthquake in the West Coast of Northern Sumatra set off a series of other earthquakes lasting for several hours which resulted in a Tsunami in the Indian Ocean. This led to widespread disaster, particularly in Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives, Indonesia and Thailand, with damage also in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Somalia, the Seychelles and Kenya. Sri Lanka, the ‘pearl of the Indian Ocean’, blessed with abundant natural resources, faced one of the worst natural disasters recorded in recent history. The Tsunami struck a relatively thin but long coastal area stretching over 1,000 kilometers - two thirds of the country's coastline. The destructive ocean waves killed more than 35,000 people, displaced nearly 2,500,000 people and destroyed thousands of houses. The overall damage to Sri Lanka is estimated at $1 billion, with a large proportion of losses concentrated in housing, tourism, fisheries and transportation. Development Partners range from private individuals both inside and outside Sri Lanka, to governments and NGOs. Coastal infrastructure, namely roads, railways, power, telecommunications, water supply and fishing ports were also significantly affected. Reactions ranged from immediate assistance to communities and local governments in restarting to function as speedily as possible, to short and long-term assistance in supporting communities to rebuild their infrastructure and housing so that they might again have normal lives and eventually recover from the trauma of the tsunami. As the infrastructure consists primarily of transportation, electric and telecommunications, and water and sewerage facilities that provide services to the public through a network of roads, rails, ports, airports, pipes and lines, the effectiveness of infrastructure systems impact on all economic activities. In this context, this paper aims to analyse the impact of the Tsunami on infrastructure facilities in Sri Lanka and how the postTsunami reconstruction process has affected the development of the same. A comprehensive literature review was carried out regarding the Tsunami and its impact on the nation. The infrastructure-related reconstruction and rehabilitation data were obtained from the RADA (Reconstruction And Development Agency, formerly TAFREN) through unstructured interviews conducted among personnel involved in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of infrastructure facilities. Results confirm that after almost one and a half years, the Tsunami rehabilitation process is slow as compared to its start

Effects of post disaster infrastructure reconstruction on disaster management cycle and challenges confronted: The case of Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka

There has been an increase in the number of natural disasters over the past few years. Sri Lanka was particularly hard hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004, which caused devastating effects on the economy, in terms of huge human and economic losses, and washed away most of its basic infrastructure that served the poorer communities while significantly setting back the development efforts of the country. The developing countries are less able to face the impacts of disasters and so it is imperative to develop the infrastructure for the poorer nations in order to quip them to manage disasters. Without being able to provide the basic infrastructure, the plight of these affected people have been further compounded. Post-disaster reconstruction has a key relevancy to development discourse and disaster management cycle; particularly infrastructure reconstruction should be envisaged from development perspectives. However infrastructure reconstruction projects are sandwiched between the short-term necessity to act promptly and the long-term requirement of sustainable development. In this context this paper aims to discover the necessity of rebuilding infrastructure for a successful disaster management cycle and some key challenges for post-tsunami long-term infrastructure reconstruction in Sri Lanka. A comprehensive literature review was carried out regarding these issues. Results confirm that infrastructure can both reduce the losses resulting from natural disasters and facilitate easy post-disaster recovery and thus more investment in infrastructure reconstruction is needed. Currently disaster management teams in Sri Lanka faces some key challenges in reconstructing the affected infrastructure; most aggravating is the unfamiliarity of the event, poor institutional capacity, and current security problems in the north and east of the country. Sri Lanka has to learn much from other settings and there is a strong need to develop the capacity

Economic development perspectives of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction: Post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka was found to be a disaster prone country in the recent past. The impact is more severe when developing countries are faced to various natural or man-made disasters. Impact appears in many forms; loss of lives and property, economic impact, social impact etc. As a developing country, Sri Lanka is much more concerned with the country’s economic development. Therefore, it is wise to look into post-disaster activities in development perspectives and integrate disaster risk reduction concerns into economic development activities. This paper reveals the importance of post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction in economic development. A comprehensive literature review was carried out regarding the role of infrastructure in disaster management, economic development together with the key indicators of economic development

Exploring good practice knowledge transfer related to post tsunami housing re-construction in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka was badly affected by the tsunami that occurred on 26th December 2004. The tsunami destroyed about two-thirds of the Sri Lankan coastline and affected more than 1,000,000 people. It does not only affected the lives of the community, but also had a devastating effect on their housing and livelihoods. The overall loss of 100,000 or more houses due to the tsunami proved to be a major challenge to the emergency response teams and disaster planners. Although several major disasters of varying magnitudes have occurred in the world, the body of knowledge related to post-disaster housing reconstruction and rehabilitation appears fragmented and poorly integrated. This paper attempts to fill this theoretical gap by focusing on the extent to which good practice knowledge transfer helps in overcoming this problem for more effective and efficient delivery of post-tsunami housing in Sri Lanka. The paper applied knowledge transfer principles within the context of the two housing reconstruction strategies employed in post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Sri Lanka; namely donor-driven housing and owner driven housing. The results of this study reveal that the knowledge transfer within this context cannot be simply copied and inserted from one context without any localisation. Therefore, the paper proposes a high-level abstraction of the core principles of community engagement through participatory techniques associated with appropriate capacity and capability building techniques that will enable the various stakeholders to create a new application to suit the appropriate context of the transfer destination (post-tsunami context in Sri Lanka)

Exploring good practice knowledge transfer related to post tsunami housing re-construction in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka was badly affected by the tsunami that occurred on 26th December 2004. The tsunami destroyed about two-thirds of the Sri Lankan coastline and affected more than 1,000,000 people. It does not only affected the lives of the community, but also had a devastating effect on their housing and livelihoods. The overall loss of 100,000 or more houses due to the tsunami proved to be a major challenge to the emergency response teams and disaster planners. Although several major disasters of varying magnitudes have occurred in the world, the body of knowledge related to post-disaster housing reconstruction and rehabilitation appears fragmented and poorly integrated. This paper attempts to fill this theoretical gap by focusing on the extent to which good practice knowledge transfer helps in overcoming this problem for more effective and efficient delivery of post-tsunami housing in Sri Lanka. The paper applied knowledge transfer principles within the context of the two housing reconstruction strategies employed in post-tsunami housing reconstruction in Sri Lanka; namely donor-driven housing and owner driven housing. The results of this study reveal that the knowledge transfer within this context cannot be simply copied and inserted from one context without any localisation. Therefore, the paper proposes a high-level abstraction of the core principles of community engagement through participatory techniques associated with appropriate capacity and capability building techniques that will enable the various stakeholders to create a new application to suit the appropriate context of the transfer destination (post-tsunami context in Sri Lanka)

Disaster risk reduction strategies and post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction

World’s vulnerability to natural disasters has increased over the last few years. Hence, mainstreaming disaster risk reduction into constructed facilities has taken up an important role in the whole of the disaster management cycle. This paper aims to study the importance of mainstreaming disaster risk reduction in to postdisaster infrastructure reconstruction and the initiatives taken by the relevant bodies in order to minimize the future natural risks in reconstruction of infrastructure. Reconstruction serves to reinforce the society or sometimes even increase the vulnerability of the society. Therefore, investment in the physical infrastructure for disaster management is essential as it can result in reduced loss of lives in case of a disaster, do withstand disasters, reduces the risk of failure and thus contributes to disaster reduction and prevention. However, infrastructure reconstruction programs should aim to change the vulnerable conditions for the development of the country. It is well identified that all critical infrastructure facilities must be designed to a given level of safety from disaster impact. Moreover, such guidelines must be provided to designers and adequate monitoring system be in place. Thus, the routine reconstruction of infrastructure should, for example, incorporate design features that protect them from known hazards. The research reveals strategies used in general and in specific to the infrastructure sectors in addressing the above issues. A comprehensive literature review was carried out on the present situation with regard to above-mentioned measures. This research expects to strengthen the infrastructure reconstruction process by reporting the practical measures taken in reduction of future risks in the posttsunami infrastructure reconstruction of Sri Lanka

Damage Mechanisms in Tapered Composite Structures Under Static and Fatigue Loading

In this work an integrated computational/experimental approach was developed to validate the predictive capabilities of State-of-the-Art (SoA) Progressive Damage Analysis (PDA) methods and tools. Specifically, a tapered composite structure incorporating ply-drops typical in the aerospace industry to spatially vary structural thickness was tested under static tension and cyclic tension fatigue loads. The data acquired from these tests included quantitative metrics such as pre-peak stiffness, peak load, location of delamination damage onset, and growth of delaminations as functions of applied static and fatigue loads. It was shown that the PDA tools were able to predict the pre-peak stiffness and peak load within 10% of experimental average, thereby meeting and exceeding the pre-defined success criteria. Additionally, it was shown that the PDA tools were able to accurately predict the location of delamination onset and satisfactorily predict delamination growth under static tension loading. Overall, good correlations were achieved between modeling and experiments

A Giant Sample of Giant Pulses from the Crab Pulsar

We observed the Crab pulsar with the 43-m telescope in Green Bank, WV over a timespan of 15 months. In total we obtained 100 hours of data at 1.2 GHz and seven hours at 330 MHz, resulting in a sample of about 95000 giant pulses (GPs). This is the largest sample, to date, of GPs from the Crab pulsar taken with the same telescope and backend and analyzed as one data set. We calculated power-law fits to amplitude distributions for main pulse (MP) and interpulse (IP) GPs, resulting in indices in the range of 2.1-3.1 for MP GPs at 1.2 GHz and in the range of 2.5-3.0 and 2.4-3.1 for MP and IP GPs at 330 MHz. We also correlated the GPs at 1.2 GHz with GPs from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), which were obtained simultaneously at a higher frequency (8.9 GHz) over a span of 26 hours. In total, 7933 GPs from the 43-m telescope at 1.2 GHz and 39900 GPs from the GBT were recorded during these contemporaneous observations. At 1.2 GHz, 236 (3%) MP GPs and 23 (5%) IP GPs were detected at 8.9 GHz, both with zero chance probability. Another 15 (4%) low-frequency IP GPs were detected within one spin period of high-frequency IP GPs, with a chance probability of 9%. This indicates that the emission processes at high and low radio frequencies are related, despite significant pulse profile shape differences. The 43-m GPs were also correlated with Fermi gamma-ray photons to see if increased pair production in the magnetosphere is the mechanism responsible for GP emission. A total of 92022 GPs and 393 gamma-ray photons were used in this correlation analysis. No significant correlations were found between GPs and gamma-ray photons. This indicates that increased pair production in the magnetosphere is likely not the dominant cause of GPs. Possible methods of GP production may be increased coherence of synchrotron emission or changes in beaming direction.Comment: 33 pages, 10 figures, 6 tables, accepted for publication in Ap

Human-Computer Music Performance: From Synchronized Accompaniment to Musical Partner

Live music performance with computers has motivated many research projects in science, engineering, and the arts. In spite of decades of work, it is surprising that there is not more technology for, and a better understanding of the computer as music performer. We review the development of techniques for live music performance and outline our efforts to establish a new direction, Human-Computer Music Performance (HCMP), as a framework for a variety of coordinated studies. Our work in this area spans performance analysis, synchronization techniques, and interactive performance systems. Our goal is to enable musicians to ncorporate computers into performances easily and effectively through a better understanding of requirements, new techniques, and practical, performance-worthy implementations. We conclude with directions for future work