Abstract
On December 26, 2004, the coastal belts of Sri Lanka and several other countries bordering the Indian Ocean suffered massive loss of life and damage to property due to the tsunami unleashed by the third largest earthquake ever recorded. One way of mitigating potential loss of lives from a similar event in the future is through advance warning of an approaching tsunami and quick evacuation of vulnerable coastal communities to safer areas. The detailed planning necessary for such evacuation exercises requires information about the level of hazard in each locality, which is usually based on inundation maps showing the depth flooding. However, the ability of a person to survive a flood flow depends not only on the depth of inundation but also on the flow velocity. Accordingly, the present paper employs a numerical model to compute the temporal variation of both the flow depth and the flow velocity across the entire computational domain in three cities on the south coast of Sri Lanka as well as the results from an experimental study on the human stability in tsunami overland flow to develop a procedure to demarcate the areas that should be evacuated in case of a tsunami warning.
Highlights
On December 26, 2004, coastal belts of several Indian Ocean countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand suffered massive loss of life and damage to property due to the tsunami unleashed by the mega-thrust earth quake of Miv = 9.1 - 9.3 in the SumatraAndaman subduction zone
We describe the methodology adopted in demarcating the high risk areas based on human stability considerations in tsunami overland flow, i.e., during both the run-up and run-down processes, in the three cities under consideration, namely, Galle Matara and Hambantota
We see that the main bus terminal and the surrounding area including the locality to the north to a distance of about 750 m in the valley between the two hilly areas falls into high hazard category based on the classification method used in the present paper
Summary
On December 26, 2004, coastal belts of several Indian Ocean countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand suffered massive loss of life and damage to property due to the tsunami unleashed by the mega-thrust earth quake of Miv = 9.1 - 9.3 in the SumatraAndaman subduction zone. The enor mity of this unprecedented tragedy clearly showed the potential vulnerability of the coastal belt of Sri Lanka to the forces of nature, especially to the extreme geological and meteo rological happenings in the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean around the country. One necessary requirement in planning- such evacuation is to identify which areas are not safe and which areas are safe. Often, such a classification of the tsunami hazard is based on inundation maps showing the depth of flood ing. We apply this method to three cities on the south coast of Sri Lanka, namely, Galle, Matara and Hambantota, devastated by the 2004 tsunami
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