I’m back in Sri Lanka one year after the tsunami of 2005. As always, being on the ground and reading the local papers gives a much better sense of what’s actually happening than anything in the international media. There are some interesting comparisons between what’s happened here and the response to Hurricane Katrina in the US.

Progress in rebuilding has been generally slow but also inconsistent. Tourism has almost completely recovered, but rebuiliding of fishing and individual homes has been much slower.

Building has been slowest in the hardest hit areas of the east the country, which is also the area of greatest political instability. In that region, only 50 or so houses have been rebuilt. In part, the slow pace of rebuilding has been the fault of well-intentioned by poorly thought out government responses soon after the initial crisis.

The government established a buffer zone of between 100 and 200 meters (200 in the east) where building was no longer permitted, promising to relocate people in that buffer zone to new homes elsewhere. Oddly, the buffer zone applies to homes but not hotels.

This plan utterly failed to take into account the time and expense of finding these homes, as well as the difficulties caused by moving people dependent on fishing so far inland. Uncertainty about the buffer zone has been widely blamed for the slow pace of reconstruction; the government only recently relented on the buffer zone but has yet to draw up a clear alternative policy.

The initial emergency response to the tsunami was more effective than that of the US government to Katrina, but bureaucracies the world over revert to common form given a little breathing room.

Given the slow pace of rebuilding, there are many throughout the country who are without good homes, a plight that is also familiar to Katrina victims. It’s going to be a long term process to fix the issues. There is widespread scorn here for the parachute journalistswho appeared briefly at the moments of greatest death and sorrow and then disappeared for the next hotspot. There are, however, some journalist, relief agencies, and so forth who are here for the long haul.

There has apparently been progress in setting up a tsunami warning system. Effectively implemented, this will probably do a lot more to prevent loss of life than the buffer zone could, and at a far lower cost.