Water access in post-tsunami Indonesia

The health consequences of disaster recovery efforts are rarely evaluated comprehensively. With increases in public spending usually accompanying claims by aid agencies and national governments about improving resilience, the potential impacts of reconstruction processes on public health deserve a closer look. This study focuses on the region of Indonesia that was hit hardest by the massive 2004 tsunami and was then the epicenter of an unprecedented recovery effort. I turn to data from a unique longitudinal survey to evaluate multiple dimensions of water access for almost 6000 families over 10 years. Using logit and multinomial logit regression analysis, I demonstrate that richer households increasingly access higher quality water sources, while poorer households disproportionately turn to lower-quality sources. This result has important implications for health outcomes and for our understanding of how vulnerability extends past the moment of a disaster.