Effects of post disaster infrastructure reconstruction on disaster management cycle and challenges confronted: The case of Indian Ocean tsunami in Sri Lanka

There has been an increase in the number of natural disasters over the past few
years. Sri Lanka was particularly hard hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004,
which caused devastating effects on the economy, in terms of huge human and economic
losses, and washed away most of its basic infrastructure that served the poorer communities
while significantly setting back the development efforts of the country. The developing
countries are less able to face the impacts of disasters and so it is imperative to develop the
infrastructure for the poorer nations in order to quip them to manage disasters. Without being
able to provide the basic infrastructure, the plight of these affected people have been further
compounded. Post-disaster reconstruction has a key relevancy to development discourse and
disaster management cycle; particularly infrastructure reconstruction should be envisaged
from development perspectives. However infrastructure reconstruction projects are
sandwiched between the short-term necessity to act promptly and the long-term requirement
of sustainable development. In this context this paper aims to discover the necessity of
rebuilding infrastructure for a successful disaster management cycle and some key challenges
for post-tsunami long-term infrastructure reconstruction in Sri Lanka. A comprehensive
literature review was carried out regarding these issues. Results confirm that infrastructure can
both reduce the losses resulting from natural disasters and facilitate easy post-disaster
recovery and thus more investment in infrastructure reconstruction is needed. Currently
disaster management teams in Sri Lanka faces some key challenges in reconstructing the
affected infrastructure; most aggravating is the unfamiliarity of the event, poor institutional
capacity, and current security problems in the north and east of the country. Sri Lanka has to
learn much from other settings and there is a strong need to develop the capacity.