HSD SGER: Physical and Social Infrastructure Impacts and Interdependencies in the December 2004 Tsunami in Southern Thailand

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This Small Grant for Exploratory Research will allow the team of researchers to collect perishable data regarding the recovery of coastal southern Thailand after the December 2004 tsunami. The research will be informed by a coupled systems approach, which assumes that the aggregate social, political, economic and demographic characteristics of the affected areas are interdependent in a systems sense. The data will be used in models that test the hypothesis of coupling between physical and social systems.The December 2004 tsunami in south Asia did considerable physical and social damage to southern Thailand. This effort will focus on the collection of perishable data that can be used to apply the principles of systems science to complex sociotechnological relationships. This interdisciplinary approach is novel and can serve to define and quantify relationships between physical and social systems that have heretofore been only anecdotal. Both the social and engineering sciences will benefit by testing hypotheses developed and applied in economic sectors in a developing country.This research will assist in the development of basic knowledge about individual, group, and organizational behaviors and how they interplay with physical infrastructures in a formal systems context. It will also inform more realistic models, with which to test various organizational and operating practices. It will provide a foundation for future research on disasters of this magnitude. The data will be placed in a data repository of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Systems (NEES). In this way, the project will provide data for other NEES efforts in tsunami modeling and loss estimation. This research on the role played by physical and social infrastructure interdependencies will be of considerable usefulness to managers and government officials in natural hazards agencies, and to scholars who teach this material to students in emergency management courses. The lessons of this disaster also will be relevant to the United States, especially in areas potentially impacted by natural hazards such as, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, volcanism, and tsunamisThis project is being funded as an SGER because of the perishability of the data to be collected. In particular, it will provide direct observation of the interrelationships between the physical and social infrastructures during the recovery phase of a natural disaster. Because the accuracy of individual informants' memories falls off very quickly in the weeks and months after an event, it is crucial that this information be gathered as soon as practicable after the acute phase of the disaster.This research is supported jointly by the Human and Social Dynamics (HSD) priority area, the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE), and the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) Program.