Speed or deliberation: a comparison of post‐disaster recovery in Japan, Turkey, and Chile

Abstract

This paper compares recovery in the wake of three recent earthquakes: the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011; the Van earthquake in Turkey in October 2011; and the Maule earthquake in Chile in February 2010. The authors visited all three locations approximately 12-18 months after the incidents and interviewed earthquake specialists, disaster managers, urban planners, and local authorities. A key challenge to post-disaster recovery planning is balancing speed and deliberation. While affected communities must rebuild as quickly as possible, they must also seek to maximise the opportunities for improvement that disasters provide. The three case studies bring this dilemma into stark relief, as recovery was respectively slow, fast, and just right in the aftermath of the events: the Government of Japan adopted a deliberate approach to recovery and reconstruction; speed was of the essence in Turkey; and an effective balance between speed and deliberation was achieved in Chile.

Earthquake loss estimation of residential buildings in Bantul regency, Indonesia

“…It is still not sufficiently large for the Indonesian government to rebuild the damage building after earthquake disaster. Moreover, if we compare with data from other countries that have very high allocation budget for earthquake DRM, such as Japan, Turkey and Chile, the rebuild costs are 5.25%, 0.0626%, and 7.67% of GNP, respectively (Platt & So 2017) which is described in Figure 8 in detail.…”

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction at Five: Lessons from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami

“…While a focus on stronger recovery in BBB is not new, clarifying building back stronger as one of several aspects of BBB speaks to the issues raised by Kennedy et al (2008) and Fan (2013). Equating building back faster with building back better may be an oversimplification, as trade-offs between speed and deliberation in the recovery processes mean that faster may not be better in terms of recovery (Olshansky and Johnson 2010;Platt and So 2017). The focus on ''building back more inclusively'' as one of the main three dimensions of BBB is a significant advancement in addressing issues of an overly narrow focus of BBB on physical or technological safety (Fan 2013;Maly 2017) and the troubling promotion of top-down technological advances at the expense of community-level input (Tozier de la Poterie and Boudoin 2015).…”

Post-Disaster Shelters: A Review Of Strategies And Design Framework

“… An assessment guideline for various phase of disaster to identify the problems, the source of problems and course of actions which should be linked to roles by various agencies clearly defined to ensure swift actions in response and recovery stages (IFRC, 2013)  A balance between building speed in recovery to reduce disruption of lives, business and other economic issue involving the communities against 'building back better' with proper planning as a window of opportunity from a disaster (Platt & So, 2014, UNISDR, 2015  The development of a model to accommodate the best practice of a temporary relief shelter with the adaptability via retrofitting the institutional building is in urgent need where currently there is no attempt to the development of such model in Malaysia. Since most of the temporary relief shelter are using institutional building, the idea of retrofitting those building with all essential and equipment for disaster preparedness is seem sensible and relevant.…”