Socioeconomic Impacts and Damages Encountered with Re-activated Landslide in Udawatta Area – A Case Study from Hanguranketha Area in Nuwara Eliya District

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume III, Issue III, March 2019 | ISSN 2454–6186

Socioeconomic Impacts and Damages Encountered with Re-activated Landslide in Udawatta Area – A Case Study from Hanguranketha Area in Nuwara Eliya District

J. D. S. N. Siriwardana
Geologist, Landslide Research and Risk Management Division, National Building Research Organization, Sri Lanka

Abstract – A disaster is a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society involving widespread human, material, economic or environmental losses and impacts, which exceeds the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources. Developing countries suffer the greatest costs when a disaster hits. More than 95 percent of all deaths caused by hazards occur in developing countries, and losses due to natural hazards are 20 times greater in developing countries than in industrialized countries. Disasters may disrupt the normal conditions of existence and causing a level of suffering that exceeds the capacity of adjustment of the affected community. Among all the disasters, landslide had become the most commondisaster in the country within short period of time in the recent past. The social impacts of landslides may consequences to human populations who were lived within the affected area that alter the day to day life-styles, livelihood patterns, cultural integrity and social network of affected families. The study revealed that one of the major landslide which were occurred in the Hanguranketha divisional secretariat inNuwaraEliya district having comprehensive impacts on human lives which may cannot easily be unravelled.

Keywords – disaster, affected community, social network, livelihood patterns

I. INTRODUCTION

Landslides are basically grouped into the category of natural disasters as such events are large triggered-off by natural phenomena such as heavy rains, lightening, earthquakes etc. But most of the occurrences are due to man-made causes such as bad land use practices, alterations to the landscapes etc. Social as well as economic losses due to slope failures are great and apparently growing as the built environment expands into unstable hillside areas under the pressures of expanding populations.

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