Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
At Nua village, although the village was relocated away from the previous site to
resolve the land use confl ict between the village and the ACRSD, another problem
has arrived instead: the water shortage, especially during the dry season. Moreover,
the location of the new site for the Nua village was unfortunately still in the low
elevation that could still be affected by the tsunami in the future. Therefore the
planning of a land use and the natural resources sharing need to be considered very
seriously in order to sustain a long term wellbeing of the residents.
As most of the housings and living supplies including fi shing boats were donated
to the affected people without much participations from the victims for what they
really needed, the values of these donated items were much less appreciated by
the recipients than what they were supposed to. Many houses were deserted;
many fi shing boats were left unattained and eventually deteriorated with times.
A large portion of the donated funds used for these purposes were unfortunately
wasted in vein.
Another challenge in the recovery processes in the affected small communities is
how we can help these communities to fi nally have sustainable, resilient communi-
ties that have immunities to the tsunami disaster in the future. As these villages in
this work and other large number of the small communities along the Andaman
coastline are relatively small, there have been very little scientifi c studies on the
tsunami hazard for these communities. Most of the tsunami hazard mitigations in
such small villages are almost purely based on the commonsense of the residents
and the planners, limited resources and only the data from the last tsunami (such as
the run up heights and inundation zones). There is a real need for the scientifi c
studies for supporting the hazard mitigation and emergency planning (such as
tsunami inundation modeling) to make it work very effectively if the disaster really
occurs. In addition, most of the residents in small communities such as these two
villages in our study rely their lives almost purely on the warning signal from the
warning towers, which is very risky. There are many “what if” questions that we
need to consider such as “what if the earthquake occurs at 3 am in the morning and
what if the warning system breaks down during the incident?” Residents in the
potential hazard areas need to have self-awareness about the disaster such as they
need to be realized that if the ground shakes violently at 3 am in the morning,
they should move to the safe higher ground without having to wait for the warning
signal. This awareness can be obtained only with a routine education outreach
distributed throughout the affected communities.
6.10
Concluding Remarks
This chapter compares the effects and the restoration processes of the communities
that were devastated by the 2004 tsunami between one of the government institutes:
the Kasetsart University's Andaman Coastal Research Station for Development and
two small local communities: the Nua and the Hat Sai Khao villages, in Ranong
province, southern Thailand. Although all affected areas could be recovered back to
normal stages as those before the tragedy, the discrepancy still remains. For the
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