On 29th September 2009, a powerful 8.0 magnitude earthquake occurred close to the main Samoan Island chain with its epicenter 190 km south of the Samoan capital of Apia. This was followed only 10 - 20 minutes later by two tsunami waves that impacted American Samoa, the Independent State of Samoa, and the small northern island of Niuatoputapu in the Kingdom of Tonga. The highest swell of the water was reportedly 11m and caused unprecedented fatalities, and serious damage, to the affected Pacific Island countries. There were 143 reported deaths, 5 reported missing at the time of the PDNA and 310 seriously injured. An estimated 5,274 people, about 1 out of 50 Samoans were affected, mainly on the southern, eastern and southwestern coast of Upolu Island.
The government of Samoa requested the World Bank support for a Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) to complement the early recovery assessment in order to formulate a long-term recovery and reconstruction strategy. The resulting PDNA was undertaken as a joint initiative of a cross-agency group comprising of the World Bank (WB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UN-ISDR), the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) working jointly with the Government of Samoa, and with technical support from the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), and financial support from the Government of Australia. A number of multilateral and bilateral agencies and NGOs also made their each unique and outstanding contribution.
Total damages and losses were estimated at US$124.04 million, equivalent to more than 22 percent of Samoa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Of the total disaster effects, an estimated US$84.8 million refers to the value of the destruction or damage to physical assets existing in the affected areas, and an US$39.26 million represents losses in the flows of the economy that are expected to occur in the country over the next couple of years as a result of the temporary absence of the destroyed assets. Reconstruction costs were developed for two options: (i) “build back”, and (ii) “build back and relocate”and were estimated at US$117 million under option (i) and at US$ 167.4 million under option (ii). A disaster risk management program was also proposed that involved (i) risk Identification, (US$190,000 for short-term, US$800,000 for long term); (ii) risk reduction, both structural and non-structural (US$50,000 each for short- and long-term); and (iii) risk transfer and insurance (US$70,000 for short term and US$410,000 for the long-term).