The Capability of Spatial Analysis in Planning the Accessibility for Hazard Community from Debris-Flow Events

Debris flow is a destructive disaster causing tragic loss and damages to vulnerable people and their properties in many regions around the world. According an impact of this disaster, hazard areas are submerged in mud and debris causing enormous difficulties to all relevant organisations and affected people to access over the hazard community. Although an inaccessibility is one of the major problems considered to be solved in an urgent stage, the lack of a comprehensive study in activities of involved people through time line since the disaster occurrence causes a difficulty to plan the feasible solution to overcome those problems effectively. Therefore, this paper presents the existing knowledge in several activities related to accessibilities in hazard areas. Additionally, the initial findings derived from interviews conducted as a part of a doctoral research are determined showing real activities related to accessibilities in a study area of Thailand where was attacked by a major debris-flow event in 2001. Regarding the explored acitivities, this study aims to introduce a potential solution to overcome the inaccessibility problems in hazard areas by applying spatial analysis techniques. This solution presents a new method of an optimum balance between the explored problems from the interviews of affected people and the practices conducted by the local government to solve the inaccessibility in the hazard area. Some suggestions are addressed at the end of the paper to propose some additional practices with some considered factors for the spatial database design

Spatial data potential for resettlement programmes in local communities vulnerable to debris-flow disasters

Resettlement programmes have been implemented by many governments and organisations to relocate people from the hazard areas to other safe places where they are expected to have normal or better lives. However, often the resettled communities face numerous difficulties while going through the relocation process and beyond. It appears that many social and humanitarian problems exists in most of the resettlement programmes (Menoni and Pesaro, 2008). It has been often found that the social, economic and humanitarian problems faced by resettlement communities are linked with the spatial aspects of the resettlement area (Dikmen, 2002; Corsellis and Vitale, 2005; Muggah, 2008). In order to mitigate the severity of those issues in conducting a potential resettlement programme, the information of vulnerable hazard communities must be prepared for the resettlement plan. However, the limitation of the data, i.e. spatial and non-spatial data, of the vulnerable hazard communities plays an important role to delay the post-disaster reduction tasks. An attempt to obtain and develop the dataset potential for post-disaster risk reduction proceed with the resettlement programme requires a comprehensive statement of situations during the disaster occurrence in the hazard community. Therefore, this paper presents a technique identifying the relationships between spatial and nonspatial data essential to the post-disaster risk reduction at the local scale. The obtain information derives from the deep insight interviews of affected people regarding issues associated with spatial aspects in a disaster event. The explored issues regarding the interrelationship between socioeconomic issues and spatial conditions were presented in cognitive maps showing the complexity of those issues in a resettlement programme. As the outcome of the paper, it presents the developed spatail database for resettlement programmes in local communities vulnerable to debris-flow disasters. The explored result of this paper is expected to apply with the resettlement programme in order to prevent the misleading resettlement programmes and also accelerate the post-disaster risk reduction for vulnerable hazard communities effectively