After the Tsunami: Ten Years of Recovery and Resilience
18 November 2014 10:09AM
It’s been almost 10 years since the Indian Ocean tsunami killed an estimated quarter of a million people. More than 160,000 died in Indonesia’s Aceh province, where the tsunami wiped some coastal villages completely off the map — removing every building, every road, every bridge, every tree. In some villages, not a single child survived.
In the immediate aftermath, people worldwide followed the story closely. For most, the fascination was short-lived. But not for Sanford Professors Elizabeth Frankenberg and Duncan Thomas. They began collecting and analyzing data from 30,000 survivors in Aceh soon after the tsunami and are continuing to follow the group today.
Frankenberg is the principal investigator of the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery (STAR), which collects data from Aceh tsunami survivors through in-depth interviews at regular intervals, including a 10-year follow-up survey this summer. The project also has access to household data collected about the group shortly before the tsunami. Frankenberg is a professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy. Thomas is the Norb F. Schaefer Professor in the economics department, with a secondary appointment in the Sanford School.
Frankenberg and Thomas have decades of experience working on population-based projects in Indonesia since the mid-1990s. Building on the lessons they’ve learned and the relationships they’ve built, they designed a survey and process of unusual depth and breadth. This resulting dataset is fertile ground for researchers. Already Frankenberg, Thomas, and their collaborators have used the data to study a wide range of issues related to the impacts of the tsunami and recovery in multiple dimensions of health and well-being.
Resilience in the Aftermath of Disaster
Among all the results, one characteristic stands out. “The most startling thing we’ve seen is the level of resilience the population has shown,” Frankenberg said.
Thomas added, “There was a huge amount of psychosocial stress, and what’s astonishing is a lot of the people who had high levels of post-traumatic stress reactivity were able to rebuild their lives, broadly speaking, in ways that really surprised me.”
Interestingly, some of the people who were worst off in terms of psychosocial stress soon after the tsunami were doing the best five years later. In other words, a person’s condition immediately after the tsunami was not predictive of mental health some years on.
“There are very important policy implications,” Thomas said. “If you were to rush in, provide aid, and exit, you might not identify the right people who need assistance. You might not be targeting your resources effectively.”
By providing a scientific description of disaster recovery, Frankenberg and Thomas aim to inform public policy. “Knowledge in service of society is exactly what this is about,” Thomas said. “We stick to the highest quality of science because that’s what we can provide that’s going to matter for future policy.”
Visibly, the region has recovered, Frankenberg said. “If you visit the area, you have to look closely to see visible scars remaining either on landscape or within communities—it looks pretty normal. But there are some aspects that will never recover. It’s not easy to replace the mother for a child. There are missing teenagers and missing old people and missing grandparents.”
Read the full article on the Sanford School of Public Policy website.