Road reconstruction in post ­ disaster recovery; the challenges and obstacles

Increasing numbers of events and victims caused by natural disaster have been unequally distributed throughout the world. Disfavour to the developing countries, evidence shows that developing countries are more vulnerable to disaster risk due to the significantly larger number of fatal injuries and higher threats to reaching development goals. In the event of natural disaster, road infrastructure appears to be one of the development sectors with the greatest losses and damages. On the one hand, even though road infrastructure plays an important role in accelerating the recovery process, postdisaster reconstruction of road infrastructure has not been adequately determined and has been
frequently ignored by many aid agencies giving an extra burden to the community as it adds delays to the recovery process. On the other hand, aid agencies working on reconstruction of road infrastructure may have to face issues that are unique, in context and scale, to post-disaster project in
developing countries. Accordingly, this paper tries to identify challenges and obstacles identified in the reconstruction of road infrastructure in Aceh post-tsunami recovery. Since this paper reviews the reconstruction of Aceh post-tsunami road infrastructure as a case study, limitations may then exist to
large scale natural disasters in developing countries, and in particular, post-disaster of earthquake and tsunami events.