Master of Engineering in Environmental Water Resources Engineering and Management

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Browsing Master of Engineering in Environmental Water Resources Engineering and Management by Subject "ENVIRONMENTAL WATER RESOURCES ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT - Thesis"

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    item: Thesis-Abstract
    Numerical Modeling of Tsunamis for Early Warning and Evacuation
    Udayakumara, ERS; Samarawickrama, SP
    Its creation was prompted by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and resuhing tsunami, which lel^; some 230,000 people dead or missing. Many analysts claimed that the disaster would have been mitigated if there had been an effective warning system in place, citing the wellestablished Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which operates in the Pacific Ocean. People in some areas would have had more than adequate time to seek safety if they were aware of the impending catastrophe. The only way to effectively mitigate the impact of a tsunami is through an early warning system.Other methods such as tsunami walls only work for a percentage of waves, but a warning system is effective for all waves originating outside a minimum distance from the coastline. Based on the above information, great attention was paid towards the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System. But the still Indian Tsunami Warning System has only two deep water buoys to detect the tsunami waves and two number of buoys are not enough to issue accurate warning at all. Due to this reasons, in most of the occations tsunami warnings had been issued for Indian Ocean countries including Sri Lanka, mainly based on the magnitude of the earchquake which causes the tsunami. This is a blind issue of warning such as the Sri Lankan experience in 2007 September tsunami. Therefore in order to issue a warning accurately and with confidence, there must be a properly developed thunami warning system. In this project, I'm going to develop such system for Sri Lanka considering the earthquake on Sunda fault, which lies in the Indonesian region. This fault is considered as a most critical fault for Sri Lanka. The selected region of the fault has divided in to several segments which act as tsunami sources. Tsunami modeling software "WinlTDB" is used to model the tsunami under each earthquake case. After runing the model for several magnitudes of earthquake for each source, wave heights and reaching time was measured at selected Six coastal points around the country. A database was created using the observed data for the analysis purpose. 11
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    item: Thesis-Abstract
    Tsunami mitigation measures, awareness & response in Sri Lanka
    Lawrance, MKD; Dr. Saman Samarawickrama [supervisor] | Mr. Harsha Ratnasooriya;
    Knowledge on coastal hazards among the community is very important in minimizing properly damage and also safe the Uves of people who Hve in the coastal region. Among the several coastal hazards, the Tsunami is the most destructive natural hazard that can be occurred. On 26th December 2004, the Sri Lankan community at the coastal belt experienced this massive disaster due to the Tsunami caused due to the huge earthquake occurred at off the coast of Sumathra. This resulted widespread damage both property and human lives. It was reputed that the loss of Uves in Sri Lanka is around 40,000 and which was around 250,000 in the region. The millions of people loss their homes. The damage for Sri Lankans were very high due to the unawareness and unprepardness. In Sri Lankan History, it was not experienced such dramatic hazard in the recent past. That was the main reason for increasing the damage. In this survey, it was planned to assess the degree of awareness among the community about Tsunami and its mitigatory measures. The survey was carried out in two steps in December 2006. i) Before the 2"^ anniversary of Tsunami ii) After the 2"^ anniversary of Tsunami The survey was planned for both school children and the general public. It was possible to coUect around 1200 samples from both categories. The selection of G.N Division was carried out based on the effectiveness of Tsunami whether they were effected, moderately effected or severely effected. While concentrating on G.N Divisions on such a way the schools were selected from the data obtained from the Southern Provincial Education Department. Students as well as pubUc were very keen in answering questions at the survey. Once collecting data, it was presented in graphical and tabulator forms in order to compare the results. According to the results, it was found that the community was fuUy unaware at the time of Tsunami hitting the coastal belt of the country. The media effect was not sufficient to disseminate the message among the community. This has been remarkably improved at the time of Tsunami warning given on 28*^ March 2005. But the knowledge on present developments of integrated Tsunami monitoring system, evacuation plan are not suflicient. The survey shows that the continuous actions on awareness, updating knowledge and capacity building to be carried out in order to minimize the damage that can be caused by future Tsunamis.