Development of a Framework to Examine the Transportation Infrastructure Resilience: Sri Lankan Context

Critical Infrastructures can be considered as backbones in the societal and economic well-being of the countries. In many of the countries, natural hazards turning to disasters have become a massive threat in reducing the continuous functionality and delivery of the service. Due to the systematic behaviour of these Critical Infrastructures, the failure or disruption of one infrastructure system disturbs the functioning of the whole infrastructure system network. This induces with the cascading effects triggering on one infrastructure system, impacting the other infrastructure systems in the long run. For this to mitigate, the focus on integrating Disaster Risk Reduction strategies towards reducing the disaster damages on Critical Infrastructure emerged with time. In the Sri Lankan context, each year, the disaster damages to Critical Infrastructures are rapidly increasing making a huge impact on the country’s economic development. Among them, there seems a rise in disaster damage to the transportation infrastructure sector, in which the highest damage was incurred from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami incident. Here, the damage occurred on Peraliya railway infrastructure recorded as the largest single rail disaster in the world history with loss of nearly 1700 people lives and about million cost of damage to the railway assets. Based on these background aspects, the research study outlines the development of the transportation infrastructure management framework with a focus on climate resilience aspects in Sri Lanka. The impact of each of the determinant aspects of infrastructure resilience which are interlinked with the community and organizational resilience aspects were examined with the review of the literature and as well as the questionnaire survey analysis. A field survey was conducted to examine the community resilience aspects and a telephone interview survey was conducted to examine the organizational resilience aspects from the Sri Lankan perspective. From the 323 responses obtained from the community field survey and 1004 responses obtained from the telephone interviewing, the extent of perception for each defined resilience parameters were examined. From these survey results and the review of similar framework studies, the identified parameters were outlined into a framework. This developed framework is suggested to further verify and define weightages for each parameters in the future studies.