Knowledge Sharing on Critical Infrastructure Facilities for Improved Disaster Resilience: Bangladesh Case

Study

Pathirage, C., School of the Built Environment, University of Salford, UK,

C.P.Pathirage@salford.ac.uk

Abstract

Infrastructures have been supporting communities since ancient times by providing convenience for daily life and business. ‘Infrastructure’ is commonly referred to as ‘the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons’. Major disruptions on infrastructure facilities due to natural hazards could result in secondary and further a doubled up impact on the communities due to the fact that the impact on infrastructure creates a vicious cycle, amplifying the impact of the disaster to the affected community. There is a conscious effort for disaster management at national, provincial and sub-provincial level. Despite this, knowledge appears fragmented, although there are undoubtedly many successful practices and lessons to be learned. Due to its large geography, the experiences, lessons learned and good practices on disaster management is not codified and remains with individuals as a tacit knowledge. The research aims to explore means of building resilience on ‘critical infrastructure facilities’ through sharing of good practices and lessons learned from past disasters. Bangladesh is widely known as a land of natural disasters, particularly for flooding, where disasters have become annual events in Bangladesh and is recognised as one of the most vulnerable countries towards the impact of global warming and climate change, which is mainly due to its unique geographic location, dominance of floodplains, low elevation from the sea, high population density and high levels of poverty. Of all the disasters the problem of flood has aggravated most from 1955 to 2009 and become one of the main concerns of people in Bangladesh. Cyclones, which are sometimes accompanied by storm and tidal surge, pose multiple threats to Bangladesh. The powerful Cyclone SIDR hit the south-western coast of Bangladesh on 15th, November, 2007, damaging many infrastructure facilities. Paper highlights the important of sharing good practices and lessons learned relating to community infrastructure to enhance the effectiveness of disaster mitigation strategies. It discusses lessons that could be learned from super cyclone SIDR to enahnce disaster resilience on critical infrastructure facilities.

Keywords: Knowledge Management, Good Practices, Critical Infrastructure, Bangladesh

1. Background

Disaster management efforts aim to reduce, or avoid the potential losses from hazards, assure prompt and appropriate assistance to victims of disaster, and achieve rapid and effective recovery (Warfield, 2004). As such, ‘Mitigation’ measures may eliminate or reduce the probability of disaster occurrence, or reduce the effects of unavoidable disasters. These measures include building codes; vulnerability analyses updates; zoning and land use management; building use regulations and safety codes; preventive health care; and, public education (Warfield, 2004). Thereby, the aim of disaster mitigation strategies is to reduce losses in the event of a future occurrence of a hazard. Coburn et al. (1994) classify aims of disaster mitigation strategies into two: primary and secondary. The primary aim of mitigation strategies is to reduce the risk of death and injury to the population; whereas, secondary aims include reducing damage and economic losses inflicted on public sector infrastructure and reducing private sector losses in as far as they are likely to affect the community as a whole. Whatever the definition or classification it takes, in the ideal case, mitigation should eliminate the risk of future disasters by effective sharing of lessons learned through ‘preparedness’ planning. Thereby, knowledge, lessons and good practices learned during the post-disaster reconstruction phase should be shared and transferred to the pre-disaster risk reduction phase to reduce the risk associated with disasters.

Disaster knowledge appears fragmented, although there are undoubtedly many successful practices and lessons to be learned. Moreover, the knowledge and experiences of disaster practitioners remains mainly in the individual domain as tacit knowledge. This paper aims to highlight the importance of sharing good practices and lessons learned relating to community infrastructure to enhance the effectiveness of disaster mitigation strategies. Initial discussion will describe the significance of community infrastructure, and their interdependency and vulnerability to disasters. The application of knowledge and good practices within disaster management context is presented next, while section after discusses the importance identifying critical infrastructure and the need to build their resilient through sharing and capturing of good practices. Finally paper concludes with a case study taken from Bangladesh to highlight good practices and lessons learned.

2. Disaster Mitigation and Community Infrastructure

Though there are many definitions and classifications on the term ‘infrastructure’, it is commonly referred to as ‘the basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons’ (Moteff and Parfomak, 2004). However, infrastructure can appear in many forms. Community infrastructure can consist of both physical infrastructure (also known as community assets) and organisational infrastructure or ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ assets of societies. Studer (2000) distinguishes between object-orientated systems (OS) as hospitals, police- and fire-stations, central food-storage etc. and network orientated systems (NS) as

electricity-, gas-, water-, sewer-systems. Table 1 provides a classification of community infrastructure into OS and NS systems.

Table 1: Classification of community infrastructure into object and network orientated systems (Source: Studer, 2000)

Facility Classification

Public Services: Hospitals (OS) Police-stations (OS) Fire-stations (OS) Central food distribution centres (OS)

Water: Water supply (NS) Sewers (NS)

Transportation: Roads, highways (NS) Railways (NS) Airports (OS) Harbours (NS)

Telecommunication: Surface based telecommunication (NS) Modular telecommunication (OS)

Energy supply Electricity (NS) Gas (NS) Petrol, Gasoline(OS or NS)

The physical infrastructure sector is an important part of most economies; as such systems provide basic support for life, livelihood, and communities. Ensuring that such infrastructure is safe is a major issue for governments and industry, and any disruption to these affect all sectors: businesses/economy, households and other infrastructures. Vital community infrastructure must go on working after natural and other disasters to ensure rapid recovery can occur. As Streips and Simpson (2007) highlighted, if struck by a natural disaster, the direct effect on clustered infrastructures is that they could suffer major damage, which in turn would affect not only the local areas and regions but the entire country.

The indirect effects and losses are also very important, as damage to infrastructure can have cascading effect on other industries and infrastructure. This highlights the issue of interdependency of infrastructures. Infrastructure can be highly interconnected and failure of one asset system can have a direct and damaging knock-on effect on other essential services (McBain et al., 2010). For example (cited in Streips and Simpson, 2007), if the power gets knocked out in an area by a natural disaster or other means, it will have an effect on pumping stations. If the pumping stations go down, then water is affected. If water is affected, then the sewer systems start to get backed up. It's a continuous cycle, which can branch off in different ways.

Figure 1: Interdependencies in infrastructure systems (adopted from Little, 2002)

Figure 1 provides an illustration on interdependencies of infrastructure, taken from Little (2002). Therefore, when determining criticality of community infrastructure, these scale effects and interdependencies need to be factored into. Any type of disasters can have an impact on the infrastructure systems in a Community. As Freeman and Warner (2001) argue, some simple extremes like more rain are very likely to impact infrastructure by increasing flooding and landslide damage. Complex extremes include increased summer drying, cyclones and storms, drought and flood cycles, and monsoons. Table 2 illustrates a few effects of natural disasters on infrastructure facilities.

According to Freeman and Warner (2001), floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and landslides have major impacts on community infrastructure. Therefore, it is quite important to identify necessary mitigation strategies (both structural and non-structural measures) relating to these natural disasters, which could damage and have major impacts on community infrastructure. Capturing and sharing knowledge, lessons and good practices relating to these could have a major impact on successfulness of disaster management efforts.

Table 2: Selected effects of natural disasters on infrastructure (Source: Otero and Marti, 1995)

Type of event Surface effect Infrastructure impact

Hurricane, typhoon and cyclone

Strong, gusty winds Flooding (through

rainfall) Flooding (through

storms)

Damages to buildings, distribution and high-tension lines

Damages to bridges, buildings and roads (through flooding)

Drought Dryness of earth Wind gusts Desertification

Shrinkage damages building foundations and under-ground infrastructure

Wind damage to roof tops Disruption to the water supply

Flood Soil erosion Water-saturation and

landslides Sedimentation

Softening of building foundations Buried buildings and other structures

such as roads Make hydro-power dams, water

management systems ill function Tsunamis Floods Destruction or damages to buildings,

bridges, irrigation systems, roads, power distribution

Water pollution

3. Knowledge Management and its application

In many countries there is a conscious effort for disaster management at a national, provincial and sub-provincial level. Despite this, knowledge appears fragmented, although there are undoubtedly many successful practices and lessons to be learned (Mohanty et al, 2006; Pathirage et al, 2009). Hence, there is a perceived gap in information coordination and sharing, particularly relating to disaster mitigation. A lack of prior knowledge and proper points of reference have made most of the recovery plans guessing games, eventually failing without adding appropriate values to the recovery attempts (RICS, 2006). The lack of effective information and knowledge sharing, and dissemination on disaster mitigation measures has thereby been identified as one of the major reasons behind the unsatisfactory performance levels of current disaster management practices.

Work by Polanyi (1958), Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) divided knowledge into tacit and explicit. Tacit knowledge represents knowledge based on the experience of individuals, expressed in human actions in the form of evaluation, attitudes, points of view, commitments and motivation (Nonaka et al, 2000). Since tacit knowledge is linked to the individual, it is very difficult, or even impossible, to articulate. Explicit knowledge, in contrast, is codifiable knowledge inherent in non-human storehouses including organisational manuals, documents and databases. In an organisational context, Knowledge Management (KM) is about applying the collective knowledge of the entire workforce to achieve specific organisational goals and facilitating the process, by which knowledge

is created, shared and utilised (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). However, within the disaster management context, KM is all about getting the right knowledge, in the right place, at the right time (Mohanty et al, 2006). As a strategic approach to achieve disaster management objectives, KM will play a valuable role in leveraging existing knowledge and converting new knowledge into action.

It can be perceived that valuable knowledge on disaster mitigation is present at three different levels: institutional, group and individual, in the forms of both tacit and explicit knowledge. Thousands of organisations and institutions have been supporting efforts on disaster management all over the world. However, the linkage among all these agencies that are working on disaster management needs to be strengthened in order to derive regional good practice and coping mechanisms (RICS, 2006). In order to enhance the information sharing and management of the knowledge generated, it is essential to knit these organisations and institutions, and moreover groups and people working within these institutions (UNDP, 2005). There are many gaps that could be bridged by appropriate use of professional skills, but access to these by local organisations on the front line of the recovery effort is highly constrained by lack of recognition of their existence. Therefore, recognition needs to be given for the institutions and organisations operating not only at international and national level, but at the local level too. In addition, this local knowledge can reside among the groups operating within different communities; hence, the recognition can be extended to the existence of these formal and informal groups involved with the disaster management process. The knowledge and experiences of disaster practitioners remains mainly in the individual domain. Due to its large geography, the experiences, lessons learned and good practices on disaster management are not codified and remains with individuals as tacit knowledge (Mohanty et al, 2006).

3.1 Sharing Good Practices

Leading organisations maximize opportunities across all core knowledge activities to identify, create, store, share, and use better. A good practice is defined as anything that has been tried and shown to work in some way—whether fully or in part but with at least some evidence of effectiveness—and that may have implications for practice at any level elsewhere. Three possible levels of good practice flow from this: promising practices, demonstrated practices, and replicated practices. Since knowledge is both explicit and tacit, good practice programs should comprise two elements: good practices databases that connect people with information, and collaboration or knowledge sharing and learning mechanisms, such as communities of practice or peer assists that connect people with people. As argued by Serrat (2008), benefits from identifying and sharing good practice are that doing so will

• Identify and replace poor practices

• Raise the performance of poor performers closer to that of the best

• Reduce rework and prevent “reinvention of the wheel”

• Improve services

• Minimize organisational knowledge loss (both tacit and explicit)

Good practice improvements are likely to be required by the community in order to guarantee long-term sustainability of the reconstruction (Ofori, 2002) to ensure safe conditions for future disasters. Thereby, international exchange of good practice and knowledge sharing among practitioners, authorities and institutions, particularly from the region, can significantly contribute to post-disaster reconstruction at all levels. Disasters can strike at any time and it is the magnitude of the related impacts that will reflect the level of preparedness and awareness of the exposed country and community. KM can help communities in hazard-prone areas to gain a better grasp of the ways to cope with disaster risks. Accordingly, it is now widely agreed that achieving disaster-resilience is essentially a process of using knowledge at all levels (UNESCO, 2009). Generation, transfer and sharing of knowledge are key foundations for disaster risk management and mitigation. According to Egbu & Robinson (2005), processes such as knowledge generation, dissemination and sharing are considered to be important facets of a knowledge economy. Hence, there is a growing recognition that much more attention has to be paid to the knowledge creation and sharing in the form of lessons learned and good practices in the disaster management field. Effective lessons and good practice sharing should reduce the risk of future disasters through well-informed mitigation and preparedness planning. Therefore, knowledge utilisation is a key factor in effectively executing a post-disaster management. Ensuring the availability and accessibility of accurate and reliable disaster risk information when required, entails an efficient system for knowledge sharing. In this regard, an efficient disaster risk management knowledge system is vital.

Knowledge bases of good practice are knowledge capturing and sharing tools, which provide information on the best disaster mitigation practices in different forms such as regulations, e-books, slide presentations, structural schemes, text, video and audio material (Kaklauskas et al, 2009). The tacit knowledge base of good practice consists of informal and unrecorded procedures, practices, and skills. KM systems are of value to the extent that they can codify “good practices” in disaster management, store them, and disseminate them as needed. However, tacit knowledge is highly personal, context-specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate. Therefore, capturing tacit knowledge is extremely important within the disaster management context because, once disaster consequences are eliminated, professionals tend to forget them and start something new.

4. Critical Infrastructure Facilities

It is vital to capture and share lessons learned and good practices relating to disaster mitigation strategies on community infrastructure to ensure these infrastructure go on working after natural and other disasters. However as argued by CPNI (2010), there are certain ‘critical’ elements of national

infrastructure: “the loss or compromise of which would have a major impact on the vulnerability or integrity of essential services leading to severe economic or social consequences or loss to life in a country”. According to Parfomak (2005), certain national infrastructures are so vital that their incapacity or destruction would have a debilitating impact on the defence or economic security of a country. These are commonly known as Critical Infrastructure (CI) of a community- a collection of facilities and institutions that provide vital services to people and economies. Critical infrastructure has been defined in various ways over time, but generally consists of "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to a country that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters" (Parfomak 2005). Table 3 illustrates commonly cited critical infrastructure of a community and in most cases, these falls under network orientated infrastructure systems described by Studer (2000).

Table 3: Commonly cited critical infrastructure

As described by Mili (2003), the integrity of critical infrastructure is at risk worldwide not only because of the growing frequency of extreme events of natural causes, but also because they are increasingly vulnerable to local disturbances. This is in part due to the strong reliance of critical infrastructure systems on one another, which may turn a local disturbance in one system into a large-scale failure via cascading events that has catastrophic consequences on society as a whole. According to Parfomak (2005), a major vulnerability lies in the fact that critical infrastructure is often geographically concentrated. Geographical concentration is defined as the "Physical location of critical assets in sufficient proximity to each other that they are vulnerable to disruption by the same or successive regional events" (Parfomak 2005). Sir Michael Pitt in his review of the UK

Critical Infrastructure

Utilities (Electricity, Gas & Water) Energy (oil & gas)

Telecommunications Public safety

Highways Banking & finance

Railroads Information Technology

Emergency services Chemical industry

Wastewater Public health

summer 2007 floods recommends that a level of resilience be built into critical infrastructure assets to ensure continuity during worst-case disasters.

Moving further, UK Cabinet Office introduced a categorisation of infrastructure criticality using a criticality scale (McBain et al., 2010). This criticality scale is illustrated in Table 4.

Table 4: Criticality scale for national infrastructure (Source: Mann, 2009)

As per the table, higher the category, severe the disruption it would cause. Therefore, Category 0 (CAT 0) indicates infrastructure whose loss would be minimal when considered in the national context and Category 5 (CAT 5) provides the infrastructure that would have the most severe impact when disrupted. Moreover, the Criticality Scale includes three impact dimensions: impact on delivery of the nation’s essential services; economic impact (arising from loss of essential service) and impact on life (arising from loss of essential service) (McBain et al., 2010). These are illustrated in Figure 2. Infrastructure may be classified using any one of these factors of impact. The designation should reflect the highest criticality category reached in either of the impact dimensions.

Figure 2: The three dimensions of the criticality scale (Source: Mann, 2009)

All in all, it can be synthesised that critical infrastructure can have severe/ catastrophic impact on a country when disrupted. On this regard, the three dimensional criticality scale provides a good basis to identify critical infrastructure in a country. It is vital to built in resilience to these critical infrastructures to ensure the continuity. Within this context, knowledge management could play a vital role by capturing and sharing of good practices on mitigation strategies adhered by other communities on their critical infrastructure assets.

5. Bangladesh Context: Cyclone SIDR

Bangladesh is widely known as a land of natural disasters, particularly for flooding, where disasters have become annual events in Bangladesh and is recognised as one of the most vulnerable countries towards the impact of global warming and climate change, which is mainly due to its unique geographic location, dominance of floodplains, low elevation from the sea, high population density and high levels of poverty. Of all the disasters the problem of flood has aggravated most from 1955 to 2009 and become one of the main concerns of people in Bangladesh. Cyclones, which are sometimes accompanied by storm and tidal surge, pose multiple threats to Bangladesh.

The powerful Cyclone SIDR hit the south-western coast of the Bangladesh on 15th, November, 2007 (Refer to Figure 3). According to Disaster Management Center in DMB (reported in December 18, 2007), the cyclone resulted in severe damages- 3,363 deaths, 871 the missing, 8.9 million affecting people, 2,472,944 acres crops damage and estimated over 3.1 billion US dollars economical loss.

Figure 3: Super Cyclone SIDR hits Bangladesh

The following describe the two most heavily impacted components of national infrastructure, namely roads and energy (UNDP, 2010):

Roads

Cyclone Sidr’s effects on the transport sector were largely confined to the road system (including bridges, culverts, and ferries) and to inland water transport. An estimated 8,075 km of roads were damaged across 11 districts, at a cost of approximately $115 million. The indirect damages resulting from increased road transport costs were estimated to be $25 million. About 25% of national inland water transport navigation was disrupted by the disaster, with economic costs estimated to be about $1 million. Damages to the road network provide an opportunity to repair them to modern standards, and at higher elevations to limit the scope of damage from future disasters, but at a higher construction cost. Modernisation needed to include an increase in the number and capacity of the roads to be constructed, and there was a pervasive need to replace ferry crossings with bridges – seen as an unavoidable and critical requirement for development. Main roads were considered highest priority, but it was recognized that the reconstruction of secondary roads was key to the recovery success in the hardest hit communities. By increasing the capacity and number of roads, elevating them to reduce flood risk, and building new bridges, the cost estimate was increased to $145 million.

Energy

Electrical power was the only energy sector significantly affected by the event, with rural distribution mechanisms bearing the greatest impact. Damage to the power sector totaled $13.4 million, with the Rural Electrification Board (REB) receiving the greatest share of damages ($5.1 million). The cyclone’s strong winds caused much of the event’s damages in the energy sector, disrupting the entire nation’s electricity supply for almost a full day. Damage occurred on several main transmission routes because of the sustained high winds and fallen trees. Certain substation components were also affected. The entire distribution network was impacted in the most affected areas, especially those serviced by the West Zone Power Distribution Company Limited. Fortunately, no significant damage was sustained by power plants.

Lessons Learned

• When a substantial percentage of roadways require repair, there exists a unique opportunity to upgrade infrastructure and apply hazard mitigation measures

• Reconstruction and repair of secondary roads is critical to local community recovery

• Energy infrastructure upgrades can help boost private sector capacity and increase job opportunities, thereby creating a multiplier effect on the economy

• The criticality of infrastructure components, and likewise the prioritization of reconstruction and repair efforts, is unique to locations and driven by the economy and dynamics of each region.

• Governments can issue reconstruction guidance and make regulatory actions in order to establish base standards for reconstruction efforts.

6. Conclusion

This paper highlighted the role of knowledge management in disaster mitigation strategies relating to community infrastructure. In the process, the importance community infrastructure and its vulnerability to disasters is discussed. Criticality, interdependency and geographical concentration of infrastructure assets makes them more vulnerable to severe impacts and losses. Knowledge management can ensure that resilience to these critical infrastructure is built in through sharing of good practices on mitigation strategies adhered by other communities on their critical infrastructure assets. Paper focussed on super cyclone SIDR and described the impact on two critical infrastructure facilities and lessons that could learn. Next stage of this research will attempt to collect empirical data on affected critical infrastructure assets from SIDR and capture specific good practices that could be incorporated in mitigation strategies.

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