Model of Tsunami Preparedness for Indonesian Tsunami Prone Areas Communities

Abstract

A tsunami disaster normally happens minutes to hours after an earthquake. Indonesia is prone to tsunamis that may be triggered by activity at plates’ boundaries surrounding the archipelago. In order to mitigate the risks and to prepare the people against the hazard a model that relates important variables influencing the degree of preparedness is required. Such model is not yet available for people with highly collectivistic culture such as Indonesia.

The study is aimed primarily at establishing a new model of preparedness against tsunami based on an existing model by accommodating a sense of community variable which is missing in the existing model. The existing model was developed based on an individualistic culture of Kodiak Alaska. In Indonesia where the culture is highly collectivistic, such a variable may play important role in the tsunami preparedness model. The model was tested on Parangtritis and Banda Aceh communities of Indonesia. The results were compared with the existing model where the sense of community variable is absent. The inter-related dependence relationships of variables in the existing model are found to be largely similar to those in the proposed models of tsunami preparedness in Indonesia with two significant differences. First the sense of community is the most important variable that affects empowerment, whilst the influence of community participation on empowerment is much lower in Indonesia. Secondly the community participation has insignificant direct influence on the preparedness within the collectivistic community. Therefore it may be concluded that direct community development through preparedness education and information without considering the sense of community within the collectivistic community is not likely to give significant results to preparedness improvement.