Learning from past earthquake disasters: The need for knowledge management system to enhance infrastructure resilience in Indonesia
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)
- et al.
A comprehensive model of postseismic deformation of the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake deduced from GPS observations in northern Sumatra
J. Asian Earth Sci.
(2014) - et al.
Investigation of the best coseismic fault model of the 2006 Java tsunami earthquake based on mechanisms of postseismic deformation
J. Asian Earth Sci.
(2016) - et al.
Fault source of the 2 September 2009 Mw 6.8 Tasikmalaya intraslab earthquake, Indonesia: analysis from GPS data inversion, tsunami height simulation, and stress transfer
Phys. Earth Planet. In.
(2019) - et al.
Identifying the most explainable fault ruptured of the 2018 Palu-Donggala earthquake in Indonesia using coulomb failure stress and geological field report
Geodesy and Geodynamics
(2020) - et al.
Interplate coupling model off the southwestern coast of Java, Indonesia, based on continuous GPS data in 2008–2010
Earth Planet Sci. Lett.
(2014) - et al.
Top-down assessment of disaster resilience: a conceptual framework using coping and adaptive capacities
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
(2016) - et al.
Emergency knowledge management and social media technologies: a case study of the 2010 Haitian earthquake
Int. J. Inf. Manag.
(2011) - et al.
Knowledge management systems in support of disasters management: a two decade review
Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change
(2013) - et al.
Knowledge management practices in disaster management: systematic review
Int. J. Disaster Risk Reduct.
(2020) - et al.
Questioning knowledge foundation: What is the best way to integrate knowledge to achieve substantial disaster risk reduction?
Int. J. Disaster Risk Reduct.
(2020)