Community resilience to mass flooding event of 2017: a case of severely inundated local admin areas in Kuruwita dsd, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Sri Lanka is an island country situated in the tropics that has adversely been affected by many hydrometeorological disasters such as floods, landslides, torrential rainstorms, and droughts for years. By contrast, the country experienced mass flooding events in 2003, 2016, and 2017 during the past two decades. Especially, examining of the level of community resilience of disaster affected areas plays a cardinal role in revivifying victims’ livelihoods. On this context, this paper sheds some lights on the investigation of community resilience in eight flood affected Grama Niladari Divisions (GNDs) situated in Kuruwita DSD in Sri Lanka. This study occupied with the mixed-research method approach covering both the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of resiliency indicators. Mainly the study collected the empirical data covering the resiliency indicators/variables such as households’ educational level, monthly income, social network degree densities, number of organizational memberships, and the count of mostly supported friends. The data collection course covered 114 flood affected households situated in eight GNDs, in accordance with the random sampling method. The study used general data normalization mechanism in order to normalize all the resilience indicators. In addition to that the study also occupied with Getis-Ord Gi* spatial statistic test in order to determine the hot spot and cold spot of community resilience for flooding. The results revealed that the GNDs such as Miyanadeniya, Ovitigama, Pahalagama, Kithulpe exemplified a higher proportion are at risk of low resiliency for mass flooding event occurred in the year 2017. The rest of GNDs showed a lower level of risk on the community resilience. This paper bridges some gaps of the extant body of literature by examining the disaster resiliency discourse in disaster risk management in the context of Sri Lanka.