The Contribution Of Quantity Surveyors In Disaster Risk Management In Sri Lanka

A disaster is defined as a serious disruption of the functioning of society, causing widespread human, material or environmental losses, which exceed the ability of an affected society to cope using only its own resources. Disasters, both natural and man-made, cause major damage and loss of life. Because of this, governments around the world are looking at building resilience to ensure communities can recover quickly and have minimal impact from a disaster. Part of building resilience is to plan for disaster management and recovery. Disaster management can be explained as the systematic process of using administrative decisions, organization, operational skills and capacities to implement policies, strategies and coping capacities of the society and communities to lessen the impact of natural hazards and related environmental and technological disasters.

This research will look into looks at the role that built environment professionals can and should offer in supporting and empowering communities and the groups most vulnerable to disasters, especially in developing countries. It sets out how the different built environment professions can be engaged, individually or in combination, at different stages in the various phases of disaster risk management and response.

The process of disaster management is commonly visualized as a two-phase cycle, with post-disaster recovery informing pre-disaster risk reduction, and vice versa. The disaster management cycle illustrates the ongoing process by which governments, businesses, and civil society increase resilience by planning for and reducing the impact of disasters, reacting during and immediately following a disaster, and taking steps to recover after a disaster has occurred.

Disasters can be classified as Natural Disaster and Man Made Disasters. Natural Disasters can occur due to Earth Quake, Volcanic Eruption, landslide and floods. Man Made Disasters are the result of various untoward incidents like chemical spills, toxic gas releases road accidents, fire and explosion, collapse of building, nuclear warfare, electrical shock etc. Disasters can and do occur without warning at any time often with profound and sometimes catastrophic effects.

Hence, emergency planning and emergency action are as integral to disaster management. The ability to handle a disaster successfully is an important management discipline. It saves life, property and resources, relieves suffering, prevents escalation and collateral damage, underwrites job, businesses and financial assets, facilitates investigations, speeds recovery and return to the normality, and protects the environment.

When considering the Sri Lankan contest, Planning stage is still under developing as a result of a Post disaster management Recovery long term process of a Tsunami in 2004. Reconstruction is a key stage of a disaster risk management. Reconstruction process may be divided into two main programs, first is building housing units and the second is restoring or building infrastructure: roads, ports, electricity, lifelines, railways, water supply and sanitation. Housing projects seems to be first priority in most post disaster reconstructions in many countries, needed by disaster’s victim and become first priority for the government. With a focus on disaster risk management, there needs to be an ability for the Quantity Surveyors to be able to assist immediately after a disaster in post disaster reconstruction projects. The issues addressed in this research is the role quantity surveyors at various stages of the disaster reconstruction and particularly in what ways they can be involved with disaster risk management.

The previous works on involvement of quantity surveyors in disaster management done under proposing emergency responses.

Investigations of the involvement and inputs of key stakeholders (architects, engineers, developers, clients, etc.) with respect to disaster risk reduction through the construction life cycle have notably been carried out by. Their work has emphasized the actual versus ideal inputs of key stakeholders thus exposing gaps in existing practice. However, it has been focused on built-in resilience, i.e. the preventative /mitigation-oriented, pre-disaster interventions mapped to a 'normal' (as opposed to a more expansive) construction life cycle so that disaster response and recovery / reconstruction have been beyond the scope of their research.

Prieto (2002), in his address to the Royal Academy of Engineering on the lessons drawn from the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers, framed his vision of future education requirements with reference to the disaster management cycle. He proposed a new '3Rs' - resist, respond and recover - as the cornerstone for the education of engineers. With regard to both 'respond' and 'recover', he drew attention to specific, additional roles and the corresponding training and educational needs of construction professionals relating to infrastructure operation during emergency response and subsequent recovery of critical infrastructure to normal operation. Similarly, Peña-Mora et al. (2008) identified specific disaster response roles for civil engineers and recommended their inclusion into the emergency response team traditionally comprising only the police, fire and ambulance services.

Until now, there has been some work in specifying Mapping Construction industry roles to the disaster management cycle, but there is no any specific research had been done to determine the skills and competencies required for the disaster risk Management in either Sri Lanka or World Wide Contest.

Being procurement and cost management the Quantity Surveying professions unique skill-base, thus curriculum can be improved by incorporating the principles of procurement, contract management and cost management for emergency situations and post-disaster reconstruction. Quantity Surveyors can identifying their involvement with Disaster Risk Management industry and providing their service the public.