Rapid Assessment for Resilient Recovery and ... - GFDRR

Some recommendations here are similar to those in the DRM chapter and the Flood
Control, Drainage and Irrigation chapter and coordination amongst responsible agencies
will be necessary to avoid overlap and duplication of efforts.
Integrating Disaster Resilience into Transport Sector Programming
It is always possible to ensure that a road or other network will never be inundated.
However, the cost for doing so, for very infrequent events, cannot be justified except for
defined routes that serve essential purposes. Once it has been accepted that parts of the
network will be inundated, and that inundation becomes reasonably predictable through
the modeling referred to above, it is then necessary for the agencies responsible for the
road networks to develop plans for managing the predicted, and actual, inundations as
they happen. Observations made during the field visits that were undertaking during the
preparation of this part of the assessment indicated that the agencies responsible for
transport infrastructure reacted to the event very effectively, partly it must be said because
the flood advanced at such a slow pace, which gave adequate time to prepare. Had that
time been augmented by information about the likely height and extent of the flood – information
that could be provided by a basin-wide model – the agencies might have been able
to plan their reaction to the pending flood even more effectively. In summary, integrating
disaster resilience – in particular for a disaster such as a basin wide flood – requires as
much information as possible about how the flood is likely to develop over the entire period
of its occurrence. Effective modeling of the basin’s behavior is the key to this.
116 THAI FLOOD 2011 RAPID ASSESSMENT FOR RESILIENT RECOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION PLANNING