Water Supply and Sanitation Needs in Disasters

Abstract

Within past three decades, 90% of the natural disasters were caused by weather, climate and water related hazards, or by health epidemics and insect infestations. Also, during disasters, there are many threats to human health, which related to the environmental elements such as water, vectors, waste, sanitation, etc. For example, over two years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami caused massive devastation, people were living in temporary shelters and reconstruction projects were struggling to ensure that new housing had clean water supplies and good sanitation. At this time, diarrhea was prevalent and there were a large number of vector-borne disease cases (dengue and malaria) in Indonesia’s capital Aceh.

The aim of this article is to give an overview of key environmental health elements and how they have mutual impacts by natural disasters, to demonstrate how environmental health infrastructure and practices are central to disaster management activities, to understand how to conduct assessments to identify and address key risks relating to public health engineering elements such as drinking water, shelters, wastewater, vectors, solid waste, etc., to understand what should be considered to mitigate the environmental health risks after a disaster, to know how respond to the environmental health impacts of disasters and to manage efficiently, the disasters scenarios and its possible impacts, with respect to public health engineering elements.