Tsunami preparedness within Sri Lanka’s Education System

The Island editorial of 27 December 2022 dealt appropriately with tsunami preparedness, since the preceding date is observed each year to remember the greatest natural disaster experienced by Sri Lanka. Reproduced below is the Concluding Discussion (with a few edits) of a recent open access article in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (doi: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103473) that focused on tsunami preparedness within Sri Lanka’s education system.

Schools facilitated community recovery and educational continuity in the aftermath of the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The disaster demonstrated that the best way of assuring the resilience of a child’s education, without knowing the precise nature, timing, or magnitude of the next disaster, is to understand the classroom within a wider system. Comprehensive school preparedness can ensure that risks are mitigated throughout the education network, ensuring that the failure of a single component does not lead to the collapse of the entire system. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami highlighted that a dependence on the physical security of building assets neither fully protects against catastrophic human losses, nor enables a coordinated and resilient response. There are currently 430 schools directly exposed to tsunami in Sri Lanka, most of which were built to the same pre-tsunami designs, without any tsunami strengthening measures. Tsunami preparedness, including effective evacuation and system-wide disaster management strategies, are therefore essential. Disaster risk reduction efforts in Sri Lanka should thus focus on ensuring system-wide educational service continuity rather than solely relying on the strength and safety of physical assets. This point has been clearly emphasised by the recent COVID-19 emergency when physical school attendance was severely impeded. Through the use of 25 semi-structured interviews with school principals in the Ampara, Batticaloa and Galle districts, together with 8 interviews with education, government and disaster management officials, the present study evaluated the tsunami preparedness of the school system in Sri Lanka.

It is found that in Sri Lanka, school principals hold much of the responsibility for preparing their schools against tsunami-related threats. These principals are aware of the tsunami hazard facing their schools and acknowledge that tsunami is the hazard their schools are least prepared for. This is positive, as risk awareness is a necessary first step to engaging with or adopting risk reduction measures. However, simply being aware of a risk is not enough to ensure the adoption of risk reduction measures. Limits in capacity, budget, time, agency and other contending demands are all likely to hamper the adoption of risk reduction measures. This is especially so for a hazard such as a tsunami with very long and variable return periods, which, in the case of Sri Lanka, ranges between hundreds to thousands of years. Therefore, more immediate concerns such as the shortage of facilities (buildings, furniture), control of dengue fever, and even security concerns after the Easter 2019 attacks, become the focus of attention for both principals and officials.

Placing disaster risk reduction responsibilities directly onto schools can lead to greater empowerment and the development of more contextualised solutions. However, the interviews conducted for this research indicate that not all schools are receiving the support and resources required to, for example, draw-up evacuation plans and identify evacuation refuges. Principals are given responsibility for the school’s evacuation protocol without being provided a clear understanding of the hazard and risk. For example, it would not be appropriate to designate the upper floor of their 2-3 storey school building as the safety refuge, especially if it is within the 2004 tsunami inundation zone, since the structure is not designed to resists tsunami loads. Also, many schools do not appear to have a dedicated teacher for evacuation simulation. The authors therefore recommend that the Ministry of Education, together with the Provincial and Zonal Departments provide guidance and work with schools to develop their evacuation plans and procedures.

Only 10 of the 25 schools interviewed have participated in a tsunami drill in the past ten years. The number of schools that conduct regular drills on an annual or biannual basis reduces to only 3 schools. Despite Sri Lanka’s “National Guidelines for School Disaster Safety” requiring that all teachers can guide their classes to evacuation refuges along predefined evacuation routes, schools and teachers are generally unprepared. Teachers have a limited awareness and insufficient training and resources to carry out emergency evacuation functions. Teachers however need to be able to act on planned evacuation routes and designated evacuation refuges/points, something which many schools lack. Additionally, evacuation protocols need to account for pupils and staff with special needs to reach the tsunami evacuation point, which they currently do not do. Teachers do however receive regular training on curriculum developments and teaching methods. This provides an opportunity to integrate tsunami preparedness and evacuation training within the curriculum. The authors therefore recommend that the National Institute of Education and Ministry of Education (with others) integrate hazard preparedness education with other areas of the curriculum and encourage the regular adoption of hazard safety/drill practice to reinforce learning.

Parent involvement and awareness of the evacuation plan is critical to ensure successful evacuation and parent-child reunification. Many schools in New Zealand practice regular ‘family reunification’ drills, whereby parent groups participate in evacuation drills by meeting their child at the evacuation refuge/point. When parents are unaware of the school’s evacuation plan, their first instinct is likely to be to try and reach the school rather than evacuate themselves, as happened in the 2019 false tsunami warning in Sri Lanka. This can aggravate the crisis and impair the school’s ability to respond, for example by contributing to traffic and chaos, as well as putting themselves under greater risk. New Zealand protocol also recommends that schools should prepare ‘get-away’ kits to take during evacuation, which include first aid kits, lists of students and parent contact details, a portable radio and student medicines. The authors would add to this list a satellite telephone, in the likely case that there is extended disruption to the telecommunication network. Another suggestion is to incorporate tsunami preparedness and evacuation into the school curriculum, which can also serve to encourage tsunami preparedness at home. However, regular community-wide “end-to-end” practice drills, such as in future Indian Ocean Wave exercises (IOWAVE), involving schools, parents and emergency services is the best way of improving the tsunami preparedness of the education system in Sri Lanka.

Apart from being ready to act on a tsunami early warning and implement effective evacuation procedures, there is a deficiency in early warning transmission to schools. The 25 school principals interviewed in this study indicate a heavy reliance on early warning towers to provide an early warning. As this paper presents, half of the 430 schools within the national tsunami hazard zone are outside the direct audible range of a tsunami early warning tower. To ensure schools have sufficient time to carry out evacuations, early warning communication channels and backup systems need to be in place (several warning towers failed to operate in a false early warning in 2012). The integration of mobile phones into early warning procedures should also be studied and streamlined – e.g. WhatsApp groups that are already viewed by some as a vehicle for early warning.

Tsunami preparedness should also extend to post disaster planning and preparation. In terms of educational continuity, Sri Lanka managed to bring most children back into a learning environment within two months of the 2004 tsunami. This was accomplished primarily by pooling resources from the wider education network, for example by transferring students to undamaged schools further inland. Planning in advance of a disaster how coastal schools might gain support from the wider school network could help towards reducing educational disruptions further in future tsunami events. For example, schools could pair with other schools outside the tsunami hazard zone, to which pupils and teachers would be transferred in case of a disaster. In addition, school premises outside the inundation zone could feasibly serve as evacuation points (large open sport fields) for those directly in the inundation zone.

This work forms part of the UK Global Challenges Research Fund project ReSCOOL (Resilience of Schools to Extreme Coastal FlOOding Loads), led by Professor Tiziana Rossetto of University College, London, in collaboration with Moratuwa, Peradeniya and South Eastern Universities, and coordinated by the National Academy of Sciences of Sri Lanka. Vanguard Ltd were commissioned to conduct the surveys.

Communicated by Professor Priyan Dias