Post-Tsunami Lifeline Restoration and Reconstruction

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami caused severe damage to houses and infrastructure and resulted in massive human casualties in several countries. Although there have been several reports on the resulting damage to lifelines, processes for the restoration and reconstruction of the lifelines have not been reviewed well; these processes are important in view of the effects on people’s life, the community, and industrial conditions. A lifeline refers to a vital infrastructure in our lives. As a city becomes modernized and its population increases, a lifeline service covers a larger area with a complicated network system. After the 2004 tsunami, it took as long as a few weeks, and sometimes several months, before the process of restoration and reconstruction was begun. The victims of the tsunami faced many problems that differed from those that occur after an earthquake. This chapter attempts to elucidate the post-tsunami lifeline restoration and reconstruction process from several points of view by using case studies from Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. Tsunami restoration evaluation modeling and its application are discussed. Moreover, methods for town reconstruction planning for lifeline reconstruction are discussed. Among the lifelines, adequate water supply is important to residential life. Most coastal residential areas, which are at the highest risk from a tsunami, use domestic water from shallow wells. After the 2004 tsunami, worldwide support facilitated the water-supply system to be reconstructed as part of the disaster reconstruction projects, and the residents in the affected areas changed their water-supply system from shallow wells to a pipeline network. The end of this chapter contains an analysis of the lifeline reconstruction and its long-term effects, with the focus on residential awareness of water use before and after the tsunami.