Construction Industry Ignorance to Disaster Risk Reduction

Although experts have identified ignorance as one of the problems in implementing disaster risk reduction, studies on this subject are still relatively small. This paper aims to explore the concept of ignorance about disaster management and construction project management. Ignorance arises as a result of differences in characteristics between disaster management and infrastructure project management about disasters. Disaster management focuses on the issue of uncertainty while construction project management is accustomed to ensuring everything through detailed calculations to optimize limited resources. In contrast, construction project management handles problems through short or medium term solutions while disaster management usually talks about long-term and continuous programs. These differences lead to different perspectives and create mental-blocked for construction industry players to implement disaster risk reduction. Ignorance is also influenced by personal factors, namely motivation and intention. Motivation can be either internal or external. The internal motivation is related to personal pleasure, interest, comfort, and satisfaction while the external one is related to somebody’s efforts to achieve specific goals, getting awards, avoiding punishment or other negative consequences. This paper shows that currently the relationship between the construction industry management and disaster management focuses more on technical and policy aspects. That is the reason why this paper suggests that construction industry player also needs to learn about human behaviors in order to understand the conflicts that might arise between the two due to the personal factors of the actors. These three subjects are similarly essential and complementary to each other. Ignorance to disaster risk reduction is a product of human behavior. Therefore, ignoring the human-interest subject will make the construction industry player having difficulties in implementing disaster risk reduction concept

IGNORANSI INDUSTRI KONSTRUKSI TERHADAP PENGURANGAN RISIKO BENCANA GEMPA DI SUMATERA BARAT: STUDI PERILAKU PEMANGKU KEPENTINGAN

Construction industry stakeholders i.e. planners, contractors, supervisors and owners must pay attention to seismic aspects in carrying out their work since the loss of lives and properties during the earthquake is mostly caused by a sudden collapse of the infrastructure rather than by the shocks itself. This study aims to learn about the ignorance behavior of construction industry stakeholders in West Sumatra on earthquake risk reduction. This research was conducted by collecting and analyzing documents, interviews, and distributing questionnaires to stakeholders as research subjects. The analysis was done by recalculation of the designs, content analysis and Fuzzy Delphi methods. The results show that there is widespread ignorance to earthquake risk reduction among the construction industry stakeholders in West Sumatra. It appears in form of intentional or unintentional actions, referring to several indicators i.e. the power of the doer to take any action, the doer’s knowledge about the action and the compatibility of the results of the action with the plan. Private building owners and developers are considered as the main actors of ignorance, followed by the contractor’s field workers, licensing and supervision officers and policymakers. This study also identifies that the causes of ignorance behaviour are complex and are a dynamic combination of three aspects: the actors, social relationship and structural barriers. However, structural barriers (i.e rules and resources) are considered as the dominant cause of ignorance behavior of earthquake risk reduction among construction industry stakeholders in West Sumatra. To overcome ignorance, disaster-oriented policy making and implementation need to be improved, including transparency in licensing and certification process, public participation and quality assurance. If it is not handled properly, ignorance of the construction industry stakeholders will reduce the community’s sense of security against earthquake hazard and contribute to exacerbating the social and economic impact when an earthquake struck