Learning from past earthquake disasters: The need for knowledge management system to enhance infrastructure resilience in Indonesia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2021.102424Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Indonesia has experienced catastrophic earthquake disaster, causing thousands of losses of life and major infrastructure damage.

  • Lack of an adequate knowledge management system to promote better resilient infrastructure.

  • Effective knowledge management system could save more lives and reduce economic disruptions due to infrastructure damages.

Abstract

Indonesia lies at the region where Indo-Australian, Eurasian, Pacific and Philippines global tectonic plates meet. In the last 30 years, Indonesia has experienced catastrophic earthquake disasters, causing thousands of loss of life and major infrastructure damage. Since the 2004 devastating Sumatra-Andaman tsunamigenic earthquake, knowledge derived from various disaster experiences regarding infrastructure resilience have been improving. Yet disasters such as the recent 2018 Lombok and Palu earthquakes remain devastating. An investigation on how knowledge on past earthquakes have been managed and utilized to promote better resilient infrastructure in Indonesia is conducted. Lessons are extracted from 5 significant earthquakes causing major damage through compilation and analysis of scientific publications and reports on field surveys, works and existing policies. Factors that keep contributing to the failure of buildings and infrastructure include lack of understanding of local hazard situation, incompliance to seismic resistant codes and standards for buildings and infrastructure, problematic soil condition, and collateral hazards such as tsunami, liquefaction, ground subsidence, landslides, rock avalanche which are adding to the complexity of the seismic hazard. The scarcity of information and knowledge on the performance on resilience of infrastructure during earthquakes in Indonesia limits knowledge-based decision making in the planning, development and operation of resilient infrastructure. This study calls for the development of a knowledge management system for earthquake resilient infrastructure in Indonesia, to save more lives and to reduce economic disruptions due to infrastructure damages, and thus contribute to the sustainable development goals achievement.

Introduction

The Indonesian archipelago lies above a complex tectonic zone, where the Eurasian, Indo-Australian, the Philippines and the Pacific Plates meet. In the last 30 years, major earthquake disasters have been recorded and have caused a total economic loss of more than 160 Trilliun IDR and more than 200.000 casualties [1,2]. However, serious earthquake hazard studies and investigation was only started in the last 20 years. The opportunity to learn from the severe 1992 M7.8 Flores earthquake and tsunami, which cost almost 2000 loss of life, was missed and in fact it did not trigger a massive earthquake (and tsunami) hazard knowledge building and dissemination. The 2004 M9.2 Sumatra-Andaman tsunamigenic earthquake was a wake-up call for the nation, awareness about earthquake and tsunami hazards in the country was suddenly rising, and a massive national awareness program soon took place, fed by new knowledge and insight brought by research and investigation on the event. The disaster has triggered the enactment of the National Law number 24 on Disaster Management in the year 2007, followed by the establishment of a dedicated national disaster management agency in 2008 and development of a national Indonesian tsunami early warning system, which was recently being updated by the Presidential Decree Number 93/2019 on Strengthening and Development of Earthquake Information and Tsunami Early Warning System.

The series of significant earthquakes in Java and Sumatra islands in 2006, 2007 and 2009 have pushed scientists, engineers and government agencies to revise the national standards on anti-seismic design of buildings and infrastructure. Several studies and lesson learnt have been conducted [[3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]], improved the progress in understanding the earthquake risk in Indonesia. Recent investigations on active faults have helped in producing new Indonesian seismic maps in 2010 and 2017 [[5], [18], [19]].

Despite all the learnings from the investigation and studies conducted after major earthquakes in the country, more recent major earthquake and tsunami disasters were still taking high tolls of death and infrastructure damage. Fig. 1 shows the values of infrastructure losses (consisting of those from housing sector, social infrastructure and lifelines) compared to the total losses due to major earthquakes during the periode from 2006 to 2018. Infrastructure resilience is lacking in Indonesia. All those learnings and knowledge gained from long experiences, which are materialized in seismic maps and aseismic design standards, guidelines and manuals have not changed so much the way people in the country build their houses, buildings and infrastructure. A hypothesis is set up for this study, on the assumption that earthquake infrastructure resilience knowledge generated by many investigations on damaged infrastructure and buildings from past earthquake disasters have not been able to be disseminated effectively to produce a significant effect in improving the resilience of infrastructure in the country. The study also tries to understand the challenges in collecting and consolidating the knowledge and in providing its access to various stakeholders and decision makers in the planning, development and operation of infrastructure in the country.

Many lessons and knowledge generated by the efforts were scattered and not well managed in a coordinated and structured way, preventing their utilization for a bigger purpose in saving more lives and improving resilience of infrastructure in the country. As time passes, the lessons learned from many earthquake occurrences tend to disappear, until the next big earthquake strikes again.

The main research question addressed in this study is how lessons learned from major earthquakes in Indonesia and other countries are managed and used effectively to improve infrastructure system resilience. A literature study focusing on knowledge management for disaster risk reduction is proposed to provide the basic understanding of knowledge management elements needed to support resilient infrastructure, followed by a compilation of learnings from significant earthquakes in Indonesia in the past 30 years in order to understand what knowledge has been gained and how it can contribute to resilience building in the future. A stakeholder mapping is conducted to understand who are the main stakeholders and what are their role and responsibility in infrastructure development, and how they coordinate among them to share and make use of the collective information and knowledge for improving resilience. Existing information systems used by different stakeholders for managing knowledge on earthquake hazard and infrastructure are identified through an on-line survey, and their content are analyzed to understand how far knowledge are managed effectively and functionally. Based on these analyses, the requirements for an appropriate knowledge management system to support decision makings in enhancing the earthquake infrastructure resilience in Indonesia are identified and elaborated.

Section snippets

Disaster knowledge management in global framework

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2013 (SFDRR), signed by 185 member states during UN World Conference on Disaster Reduction on March 18, 2015 in Japan which effectively replaced the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015 (HFA) provides a potential bridge from the Sustainable Development Goals to DRR policy and practice and an integration point into the wider development agenda and offers a concrete agenda for evidence-based policy and for international technology transfer [20

Learning from past significant earthquakes in Indonesia

This section review experiences from selected significant damaging earthquakes in Indonesia, with Mw >6.0 and casualties >100, occuring within the past 30 years.

Initiatives on earthquake resilient infrastructure

As consequences of Indonesia's economic and population growth as well as rapid urbanization, the need for infrastructure increases tremendously. Infrastructure is the basic physical and social facility needed for supporting community (public sector) or company (private sector) operational activities, which includes buildings, roads, bridges, dams, pipe networks, railways, treatment facilities, housing, etc. An infrastructure system is an integrated system of the built infrastructure and its

Mapping potential knowledge management system for earthquake resilient infrastructure

Based on the information gathered in stakeholder mapping, the online information systems developed by them were surveyed. The survey was aimed to identify the available online system information that have addressed the need for infrastructure resilience improvement due to earthquake disaster, and to analyze whether they are already adopted a knowledge management model. There are eighteen online information systems, i.e., websites, related to disaster mitigation and risk reduction that cover

Discussion on the requirements of KMS for ERI

The fact that Indonesia occupies a very active tectonic zone is very much realized by the nation. Even more so now where Indonesia is actively building infrastructure, such as dams, toll roads, bridges, tunnels, buildings, and others, as the earthquake becomes a major hazard for the infrastructures development and for people who will utilize them. Based on the study on the lessons learned from previous big earthquake disasters, the awareness of Indonesian to view the earthquake hazard and to

Closing

This study has investigated on how knowledge on past earthquake is managed and utilized to perform better infrastructure resilience. Lessons learned from five major earthquake within 30 years are analyzed, as well as scientific publications and reports from conducted field surveys, work and policy are compiled and extracted, and interviews with key earthquake experts were conducted.

The authors find that much information are hardly readily available for analysis, let alone for knowledge-based

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This research is partly funded by the MIT – Indonesia Research Alliance (MIRA) Program within the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, managed by Institut Teknologi Bandung. We acknowledge the collaboration with the Urban Risk Lab of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as our counterpart. We are also supported by the Center of Excellence for Earthquake Science and Technology, Research Center for Disaster Mitigation, Institut Teknologi Bandung. We are also thankful to

References (97)

  • D.I. Inan et al.

    Developing a decision support system for disaster management: case study of an Indonesia volcano eruption

    International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

    (2018)
  • H. Nazarnia et al.

    Application of household disruption data to delineate critical infrastructure resilience characteristics in the aftermath of disaster: a case study of Bhaktapur, Nepal

    Saf. Sci.

    (2020)
  • R. Matsumaru et al.

    Reconstruction of the Aceh Region following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster: a transportation perspective

    IATSS Res.

    (2012)
  • BNPB

    Kerusakan Dan Kerugian Akibat Bencana Tahun 2018

    (2018)
  • I. Meilano et al.

    Basis Data Historis Bencana dan Estimasi Potensi Kerusakan serta Kerugian Akibat Bencana di Indonesia

    (2019)
  • W. Sengara

    The 30th September 2009 West Sumatra Earthquake: Padang Region Damage Survey

    (2010)
  • E. Gunawan et al.

    Analysis of coseismic fault slip models of the 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake: importance of GPS data for crustal deformation studies

    Acta Geophys.

    (2016)
  • E. Gunawan et al.

    Fault source investigation of the 6 December 2016 Mw 6.5 Pidie Jaya, Indonesia, earthquake based on GPS and its implications of the geological survey result

    J. Appl. Geodes.

    (2020)
  • N.R. Hanifa et al.

    Numerical modeling of the 2006 Java tsunami earthquake

    Adv. Geosci.

    (2009)
  • I.W. Sengara et al.

    Geotechnical engineering aspects related to aceh’s tsunami and earthquake disaster and the need for its mitigation strategy

    Geotech. Eng. Disaster Mitig. Rehabil.

    (2005)
  • S. Widiyantoro et al.

    Implications for megathrust earthquakes and tsunamis from seismic gaps south of Java Indonesia

    Sci. Rep.

    (2020)
  • M. Irsyam

    Development of the 2017 national seismic hazard maps of Indonesia

    Earthq. Spectra

    (2020)
  • L. Pearson et al.

    The UN Sendai framework for disaster risk reduction 2015–2030: negotiation process and prospects for science and practice

    Journal of Extreme Events

    (2015)
  • The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

    (2015)
  • J. Weichselgartner et al.

    The role of knowledge in disaster risk reduction

    International Journal of Disaster Risk Science

    (2015)
  • R. Shaw et al.

    Science & Technology into Action: Disaster Risk Reduction Perspectives from Asia

    (2018)
  • The Science and Technology Roadmap to Support the Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030

    (2019)
  • R. Deshmukh et al.

    Earthquake risk and knowledge management

    Journal of Knowledge Management Practice

    (2008)
  • L.L.R. Rodrigues et al.

    Preparation and validation of knowledge-management measurement instrument: an empirical study in educational and its sectors

    J. Knowl. Manag.

    (2005)
  • R. Van der Spek et al.

    Knowledge management: dealing intelligently with knowledge

    Knowledge Management and its Integrative Elements

    (1997)
  • K.H. Chai

    Managing Knowledge in Organizations: A Literature Review and a Preliminary Conceptual Model

    (1998)
  • A. Andersen

    Knowledge Management Assessment Tool: External Benchmarking Version

    (1996)
  • K.M. Wiig

    Knowledge Manage- ment Foundations: Thinking about Thinking–How People and Organizations Create, Represent, and Use Knowledge

    (1993)
  • K. Albris et al.

    Disaster knowledge gaps: exploring the interface between science and policy for disaster risk reduction in Europe

    Int J Disaster Risk Sci

    (2020)
  • C. Folke et al.

    Navigating Social-Ecological Systems: Building Resilience for Complexity and Change

    (2002)
  • K. Albris et al.

    Disaster knowledge gaps: exploring the interface between science and policy for disaster risk reduction in Europe

    Int. J. Disaster Risk Sci.

    (2020)
  • S. Moradi et al.

    A review of resilience variables in the context of disasters

    Journal of emergency management

    (2019)
  • T.K.K. Seneviratne et al.

    Knowledge Management for Disaster Resilience: Identification of Key Success Factors

    (2010)
  • C. Pathirage et al.

    Managing disaster knowledge: identification of knowledge factors and challenges

  • S.S. Hosseini

    The Relationship between Knowledge Management Related to Earthquake and Resilience (Case Study: Trained Volunteers of Sarasiab Neighborhood in Kerman)

    (2018)
  • M. Avvenuti et al.

    EARS (earthquake alert and report system) a real time decision support system for earthquake crisis management

    Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

    (2014)
  • C. Orchiston et al.

    Knowledge management and tourism recovery (de) marketing: the Christchurch earthquakes 2010–2011

    Curr. Issues Tourism

    (2016)
  • S. Ajami et al.

    The role of earthquake information management systems (EIMSs) in reducing destruction: a comparative study of Japan, Turkey and Iran

    Disaster Prev. Manag. Int. J.

    (2009)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text