2004 tsunami in southern Thailand, lessons learned for the Thai communities

Abstract

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. Unexpected devastation of the Thai communities along the Andaman coast lines by the 2004 Sumatra tsunami have changed the Thai perception on the earthquake and tsunami disaster forever. This paper tells about the economic and social impacts of the 2004 tsunami that affected the Thai society and the lessons learned from these tragic incident. Since then, a large amount of money and effort have been invested in the tsunami research and development, earthquake and tsunami monitoring and warning systems and a large number of educational outreach to young generations. The proper tsunami and earthquake mitigations of the central government collaborated with local governments integrated with the people’s understandings of the nature of the earthquake and tsunami help increase the readiness of the Thai community for such disaster more than ever. Still, many issues remain to be resolved such as a lack of proper maintenance of the critical facilities for the earthquake and tsunami mitigation and inadequate research and development in earthquake and tsunami sciences in Thailand. It is very difficult to maintain the level of the awareness of the people about the great danger of the earthquake and tsunami and it is also a big challenge to increase the ability of the Thai society to have better critical scientific thinking about the natural disaster.