Community Recovery after the Tsunami

(adapted from article published in the Canterbury Magazine)

 

Eight months after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami, Canterbury University civil engineering lecturer Dr Erica Seville returned to Thailand to see first hand how businesses were coping in the aftermath of the disaster.

 

Dr Seville first toured the devastated regions of Phuket, Phi Phi and Khao Lak back in January as part of an official New Zealand team funded and organised by the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering.

 

Her return trip last month was part of an ongoing Foundation for Research, Science and Technology project which Dr Seville heads.  The six-year project seeks to help New Zealand organisations recover economic competitiveness after hazard events by improving their organisational systems.

 

“It was really interesting to see how the different communities in Thailand were recovering.  Some communities have bounced back a lot quicker than we thought they would whereas for other communities the recovery process is barely starting,” said Dr Seville.

 

“I was astounded at how Phi Phi Island has bounced back.  The recovery has focused on one small area but just about everything in that area has been rebuilt.  Everyone was quite positive and moving forward.”

 

Much of the success in rebuilding Phi Phi was the result of using tourist volunteers in the clean up. “These volunteers were renting rooms and buying food.  They were very socially responsible, sharing around their business, making sure they went to different restaurants each night.  This created an incentive for tourist businesses to get back up and running.”

 

Dr Seville said it was a completely different story further up the coast at the resort centre of Khao Lak.  “Khao Lak is not getting the casual backpackers going through.  The resorts attracted European families – conservative travellers – and they are slow to return.”

In January Dr Seville talked to a local man who had just opened his first restaurant in Khao Lak, having mortgaged the family farm for security. “His business wasn’t affected by the tsunami, it suffered no damage at all. But yet talk to him now and it is so sad as he doesn’t have enough money to pay next month’s rent.  This will be a good business proposition in two year’s time but he is just not going to be able to hold on for that long. Like so many others, the business is dying a slow death.”

 

Dr Seville said there had been a huge influx of international aid into the devastated areas but a lack of co-ordination amongst the various Non Government Organisations (NGOs) created problems.  Some villages were inundated with NGOs while neighbouring villages had none.  “Temporary camps close to the main road got a lot more ad hoc aid,” she said.

 

Well-meaning foreigners have been generous with donations without thinking the issues through.  Some locals were finding it easier to stay at home and wait for random donations than to go out to work, she said.

 

“When people bring in pens from America, all that does is put the local pen seller out of business.  You are better to take the money over there and buy it in the local economy and get the money flowing through the community. It is important to start getting that money going round so people can help themselves.”

 

Dr Seville said there were important lessons for New Zealand to learn.

 

“If we have a major disaster where a whole community is devastated, how do you start from scratch?  It is almost like a New Orleans scenario; when there is very little to go back to, where do you start?  How does the Government target its aid?  What are the leverage points within our economy and communities that if we put money into them, it will have a compounding effect?”

Dr Seville believes New Zealand is well prepared for medium size events but questions how well the country could cope with a large scale disaster. 

“We have a very innovative civil defence structure and we are leading the world in some of our thinking there.  But a really big event will inevitably overwhelm the structures we have in place.

“The Resilient Organisations research programme is trying to develop solutions to these very issues.  In particular, we are developing a framework for improving organisational resilience.  We take organisations through a five step process that gets them to think outside the box in terms of a disaster.  We then take the organisation through a readiness exercise and disaster simulation so that an organisation can experience what its strengths are and also identify its weaknesses.”

 

After seeing the importance of businesses in community recovery demonstrated so starkly in Thailand, it is critical that New Zealand organisations think about and plan for how they will respond and recovery from a disaster, she said.