Moving Ahead: A Decade After the Tsunami

The geographical impact of the disaster, being uneven showed that a majority of the coastal communities living in the northern, eastern and southern provinces were most affected. Described as the biggest global media event subsequent to the ‘09/11’ attacks (Lund and Blaikie, 2010), the disaster facilitated a global humanitarian response of unprecedented nature evoking one of the ‘largest relief and rehabilitation operations ever launched by humanitarian organisations around the world’ (Lund and Blaikie, 2010). A directory prepared by United Nations Humanitarian Information Centre for Sri Lanka (HIC) in early 2005, identifies a list of 890 agencies involved in post tsunami operations in the country.