Exploring Community Preparedness for Complex Disaster : A Case Study in Cilegon ( Banten Province in Indonesia)

This study aims at examining how local communities in City of Cilegon (Banten province in Indonesia) consider `complex disasters', and clarifying their subjective perceptions. The present research is considered as the first step in our comprehensive research design beyond a specific case study. The nuclear accidents in the Great East Japan Earthquake and the huge flood in Thailand provide lessons that natural disasters can cause catastrophic influences on industries and they generate cascading effects and damages. We define such complicated phenomena as `complex disasters' in this article. Cilegon is potentially exposed to such complex disasters because it has natural disaster risks (among others, the Krakatau volcano sits adjacent to it, and recalling historical earthquakes and tsunami) and industrial disaster risks (a lot of heavy industry facilities including chemical ones), and these two types of risks can be combined and made reality. A `model for the communication of risk' developed by Rodriguez et al. (2007) is adopted as an analytical framework in this study. The model predicts involvement of many types of actors and can be considered as an adequate framework for our study. This study mainly focused on one industrial gas facility of Pertamina, a state-owned energy company, and its surrounding community (Lebak Gede village) in Cilegon. The qualitative methodologies were used in this study: One focused group discussion (FGD) and three key informant interviews were implemented by the authors. The participants of the FGD were twelve leaders of the neighborhood associations (locally described as `RT' and `RW' in Indonesian acronym) closest to the Pertamina facility (two RW leaders and ten RT leaders). The key informant interviews were separately and additionally conducted with a head of a village, a neighborhood association leader (this leader was different from the FGD participants) and a local forum entity, in order to reinforce observations at the FGD. Our survey observed that involvement of the Indonesia Power, a subsidiary of state-owned electricity company whose facilities adjacent to Petamina's facility, as one of the industry actors, local governmental agencies and the Indonesian Red Cross. On the other hand, we did not clearly identify any clear involvement of the educational institutions and the mass media, although the model of Rodriguez et al. (2007) estimates their engagement. People in Lebak Gede village have already expected potential threats by large-scale natural disasters. Furthermore, they recognize that such disasters give influence on the industrial facilities and the consequences are catastrophic. Although local residents in Lebak Gede village had a lot of experiences of industrial accidents in the past, these experiences did not initiate a significant mindset change for a more organized preparedness. Instead, they paid larger attentions to floods as their preparedness priority.This study adopted the qualitative method for gathering specific information, but more comprehensive research can contribute to verify preparedness and risk perception on the complex disasters. Although this article selectively dealt with one village (Lebak Gede village) and its preparedness and perception, the findings is to be further clarified in detail for generalizing community preparedness for the complex disasters.