| The huge loss caused by Indian Ocean Tsunami on 26th December 2004 is basically due to the lack of proper awareness and preparedness fortsunami disasters from national to local levels. Its long recurrence period of a hundred to several hundred years make tsunami hazard naturally to be missed aware by the next generations who never experience it. Sustainable awareness and preparedness therefore became inline with sustainable tsunami disaster risk reduction. Tsunami hazard map (THM) shall be used as one of effective tools in communicating tsunami disaster risk within the society to develop sustainable awareness and preparedness. This is possible because most of the key issues in tsunami disaster risk reduction – i.e. precise knowledge on the danger of tsunami hazard, immediate evacuation as priority response, assets protection is as important as life protection and society participatory andawareness can be communicated by using THM. However, several conditions may cause the less usefulness of THM, i.e. THM is not well communicated (or merely distributed) to the whole community, THM is not integrated into tsunami disaster management and development planning as a whole; and the users think that inundation information is fixed and exactly as it is shown in the map without consideration on the high unpredictability of tsunami behavior. In general, THM has important role in increasing the quality of preparedness against tsunami disaster. Nevertheless, each country or locality needs to determine clearly the THM requirement for their area to cope with their localism. |
