Shelters with thin sheet-metal walls and roofs, with a makeshift extension for the kitchen. Plastic is used to cover the ventilation gap between the roof and the walls. 

Contexts in source publication

Context 1

... with the objectives of carrying out an assessment of damage to the environment, physical infrastructure, and social fabric and understanding how such damage might affect future vulnerability. Our team included a wide range of expertise and benefited greatly from the support of both Singhalese and Tamil research colleagues, faculty, and graduate students of the civil engineering departments from the University of Moratuwa and Peradeniya University throughout the reconnaissance mission and field interviews, allowing us to interact with organizations across different ethnicities. For two weeks, we traveled along the southwestern, southern, eastern, and northern coastal perimeter from Colombo to Galle, then on to Hambantota, Yala Park, Ampara, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, and Mullaittivu Figure 1 . Special arrangements with the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization ͑ TRO ͒ allowed the team to enter the Tamil-controlled area and carry out a comprehensive assessment of local relief and reconstruction efforts. During our visit, we conducted numerous fact-finding meetings with different organizations and individuals, including national and district government officials and agencies, UN-affiliated organizations, international and local nongovernmental organizations ͑ NGOs ͒ , and research institutes and universities. In these meetings, we discussed the impacts of the tsunami on the environment, built structures, and communities; the role played by the different agencies and organizations in the reconstruction process; the ma- jor challenges encountered in rebuilding livelihoods; and the potential areas of future research. Our team monitored the recovery and reconstruction efforts along the affected coastal areas and investigated the decision-making process and policy implementation that followed the disaster. We spoke to displaced people and small business owners who had remained in their villages or were living in refugee or temporary resettlement camps. We discussed their losses, their current living conditions, how they were rebuilding their lives, the assistance they were receiving for reconstruction, and the current issues in their community. At each affected field site, we recorded GPS coordinates and conducted visual assessments of damage and recovery of the ecosystem and infrastructure. Approximately 1 million out of a national population of 19 million people 5.3% have seen their lives affected by the tsunami in some way ͑ World Bank 2005 ͒ . The tsunami completely destroyed 80,000 housing units and damaged an additional 40,000, as well as schools, private sector buildings, and public sector buildings ͑ IUCN 2005 ͒ . In initial needs assessment studies, the number of damaged homes was estimated through an aerial inspection of roofs. However, this figure may be an underestimate because in- tact rooftops may conceal extensive interior damage. At the time of our visit, most destroyed homes were cleared to the foundation, with significant amounts of debris surrounding the remnant of each structure. In some cases, half-broken homes were left standing as a sign to claim assistance for construction of permanent replacement houses. Foundations will probably be cleared once the reconstruction assistance has been dis- tributed. Most disposal of debris has taken place in an uncoordinated and unplanned fashion. In some cases, debris was dumped into wetlands, into lagoons, or was left on the beach. In cases where foreign NGOs and agencies removed the debris, they followed the government directive to dump rubble on the roadside as a temporary solution ͑ World Bank 2005 ͒ . The soil around destroyed homes has been found to contain broken up and splintered asbestos from the damaged roofs and constitutes a significant source of con- tamination ͑ UNEP 2005 ͒ . Five months after the tsunami disaster, most people from affected communities were still living in temporary or semipermanent shelters. The heavy winds and long rain showers of the monsoon season have worsened life conditions for the tsunami victims who have not been able to find permanent homes and are living in temporary camps. In some instances, temporary shelters are built on sites next to the foundations of destroyed houses. In most cases, however, these shelters are being constructed in resettlement areas. Some of the shelters built are poorly adapted to the hot, humid, and wet climate of coastal Sri Lanka. Temporary housing structures, especially in the eastern coast, are built with corrugated roofing materials, creating a hot box and very uncomfortable, some- times unhealthy, conditions. Most intermediate shelter camps have no tall trees and no shade and thus do not allow natural air flow through the living quarters. Some temporary homes had a gap between the corrugated metal walls and sheet metal ceilings to permit air flow. However, when the monsoon rains started, camp residents tried to seal the gaps with mats, plastic sheeting, and even bed sheets to keep dry ͑ Figure 2 ͒ . Temporary shelter and transitional housing are being provided by the NGOs and multilateral agencies, while the permanent reconstruction is mainly the responsibility of the government with the financial assistance of the World Bank, which is being applied in three distinct phases. The first phase, which was considered finalized by the time of our visit, consisted of assisting with the immediate recovery; the second phase is envi- sioned to finance the reconstruction process; and the third phase will consist of assisting with longer-term environmental issues and disaster management. The first and second phases were budgeted at about US $75 million each. These funds are available to the government as grants ͑ 60% ͒ and loans ͑ 40% ͒ at 0.25% interest over 40 years and a 10-year grace period. The allocation of the World Bank loan amount is based on a pret- sunami request by the government for conflict-affected housing before the 2002 cease- fire agreement. Out of the $75 million dedicated to reconstruction, $50 million is allo- cated to family housing reconstruction in the form of a $2,500 grant and a $5,000 low- interest loan for each affected household. This money is disbursed across three stages of the building process: foundation, roof level, and completion. The government has pledged to provide additional financial support of $50 per month for families in the six months after the tsunami, and it is also providing rations of dry goods and cooking oil. Distribution of this monetary aid, however, has not been uniform in all regions, with many settlements in the northern regions still waiting for the aid to arrive. The availability of funds does not seem to be a major constraint after the international community pledged an estimated US $3 billion to the economy in the form of relief and recovery grants and loans ͑ Mikas 2005 ͒ , equivalent to approximately 16.5% of the country’s GDP. To coordinate the recovery process and administer the funds, the Sri Lankan government created the Task Force for Rebuilding the Nation ͑ TAFREN ͒ , recently restructured and renamed as the Reconstruction and Development Agency ͑ RADA ͒ , with the rationale that the recovery process might become chaotic without top-level coordination for meet- ing the needs of the affected population and directing the zeal of numerous aid organizations with their own agendas of goodwill. Although the point of creating such a body was to avoid bureaucracy and speed up the reconstruction process, a gap between the directives issued by RADA and the implementation by the government remains. The mechanical potential for destruction by the tsunami is characterized by the two main variables that determine the hydrostatic and hydrodynamic pressures imposed by the water waves: wave velocity and the height of inundation ͑ Camfield 1980 ͒ . These two variables, which are related to one another, also evolve with time as the tsunami first impacts, then inundates, and finally recedes from the coast. Depending on a series of physical factors, tsunami waves appear as either fast-moving tall waves or as quickly rising surges. From different eyewitnesses, it appears that in some regions the water ap- proached in subsequent homogeneous waves 6 – 10 m in height, whereas in others, the effect was more similar to a quick and growing surge of the water level. This is also confirmed in a study by Liu et al. ͑ 2005 ͒ , in which maximum tsunami runup heights in the mentioned range were also observed in the eastern and southwestern coasts of Sri Lanka. Single-story structures were often completely wiped off their footings. The collapsed houses were primarily masonry one-story buildings with thin walls, typically 100 mm thick, and corrugated asbestos roofs; these houses were occupied by fishermen and their families. There were no structural rebar connections between foundation and masonry walls, and the houses were generally built with poor-quality materials on sandy soil ͑ Figure 3 ͒ . Buildings two stories or higher seem to have resisted the impact well. These buildings typically displayed a stronger first story built with reinforced concrete ͑ RC ͒ frames in order to withstand the weight of the upper stories, as opposed to weak masonry one- story buildings. The added resistance capability helped these taller structures withstand the hydrostatic and hydrodynamic pressures imposed by the tsunami ͑ Figure 4 ͒ . The compression in the columns by the upper stories that were not submerged might have also played an important role in increasing the capacity of the buildings to resist the lateral forces of the tsunami loads. Orientation of the walls seems to have been a determinant of performance in some cases. A two-story hotel near Trincomalee about 50 m from the shoreline was built with its rooms separated by load-bearing walls arranged perpendicularly to the coastline, with wide windows facing the sea. The windows of the first story broke, allowing the water ...

Context 2

... temporary homes had a gap between the corrugated metal walls and sheet metal ceilings to permit air flow. However, when the monsoon rains started, camp residents tried to seal the gaps with mats, plastic sheeting, and even bed sheets to keep dry Figure 2. ...