Has Thailand Disaster Management, from Tsunami to Flood, Been Better?
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Abstract
The government of Thailand has also been under the notion of making a huge amount of efforts to the improvement and development in disaster management for the past several years. In the past, Thailand may believe to be less prone to hazards and disaster. The awareness and realization in disaster risks of all level within a country were rare. Unfortunately, the effective disaster management starts with recognition of the risk and its consequences. Evidently, for the past 10 years, Thailand has confronted with variety of disasters in various scales that severely damaged the nation and left a lot of lessons learned. Tsunami in 2004 has awakened the nation to a nightmare of unexpected deaths and losses. The lesson was learned that the nation was less prepared and lack of knowledge. Improvement and development have been done tremendously in order to prepare the nation in the different interpretation of disaster risk from the past. Until 2011 Flood, although familiar and well experienced, did the nation learn the road it underwent may have some fallbacks to manage and response effectively. The article aims to share the knowledge, lessons and analyses of disaster management in Thailand over the years. The writer chooses two case-studies, Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004 and Flood 2011, to not only reflect how Thais response and perform differently but also how much improvement and adaptive capacity have been enhanced. Complex Adaptive System (CAS) approach helps evaluate the system performance and identify the improvement needed. The analysis identifies tsunami operation as non-adaptive system and flood management as emergent-adaptive one. Although Thailand disaster management has improved, ineffectiveness, fallbacks, and problems are presence.
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