Villagers climb through the rubble looking for survivors soon after the Oct. 29 landslide in south-central Sri Lanka Credit: Contributor/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Nov 2 2014 (IPS)

When early warning systems fail, death comes quickly to unsuspecting victims of natural disasters. It is a reality that millions of Sri Lankans have experienced repeatedly in the last decade, and yet those responsible for preventing human fatalities continue to make the same mistakes.

The latest such tragedy – a result of ignorance and indifference to imminent danger – struck on the morning of Oct. 29, on the Meeriyabedda tea estate in Koslanda, a hilly region about 220 km east of the capital, Colombo.

After persistent rains, a two-km stretch of hillside caved in early morning, burying an estimated 66 small houses belonging to estate workers under some 30 feet of mud.

An initial situation report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) suggested there had been roughly 300 occupants in these homes; some had been away at work, and most of the children were in school when the disaster occurred.

Four days later four bodies had been recovered and 34 were listed as missing, a figure that was revised from an initial estimate of 100. Over 1,800 have been displaced and most of them may never return to their homes again.

“The real tragedy is there was ample time to move out, warnings telling [villagers] to do so and places that they could move into." -- Indu Abeyratne, manager of the early warning systems of Sri Lanka Red Cross Society (SLRCS)
But the land did not come barreling down the mountainside without a warning. In fact there had been warnings that these houses were a death trap almost a decade ago.

In 2005, the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO) carried out a survey of the area and made its first warning call.

“We found that the land on which the houses were standing was not stable and prone to landslides and our recommendation was relocation,” N K R Seneviratne, NBRO’s geologist for the south-central Badulla District, who headed the survey, told IPS.

In fact some officials at the landslide site said that the 66 houses that had been completely buried by the earth were clearly identified as those most in danger.

Six years later a similar survey was carried out and the recommendations were the same. Small landslides prompted the surveys. In both instances, Seneviratne said, recommendations were conveyed to villagers as well as public officials, who failed to take action on relocation.

Just before this most recent landslide, which occurred around 7.10 in the morning, Seneviratne said that his office had sent a warning to the Haldummulla Divisional Secretariat, the local public authority. Though some villagers were also made aware of the risks, most decided to stay put.

“There were warnings, but all that systematic dissemination process ended once it reached the Divisional Secretariat level; after that, at best, it was ad hoc, at worst nothing seems to have happened,” Indu Abeyratne, manager of the early warning systems of the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society (SLRCS), which is now coordinating relief efforts at the site, told IPS.

The villagers themselves missed the signs. In 2009, the Disaster Management Center (DMC), the main government agency overseeing early warnings and disaster assistance, together with the NBRO and the Red Cross, conducted a major community awareness programme in the Koslanda area.

Local villagers were advised to form community groups to act as watchdogs, scanning for imminent signs of danger and preparing evacuations plans. Megaphones were distributed, which villagers could use to gather crowds in an emergency, while the Meeriyabedda tea estate was also given a simple rain gauge to keep track of the levels of precipitation.

The NBRO has its own rain monitor at a school nearby and it was reading that at least 125 mm of rain had fallen overnight by the morning of Oct. 29. If anyone on the estate has been monitoring the village rain gauge, it should have been clear that the soil below was getting too soggy for anyone’s comfort.

But no one was watching the red flags, and when the earth collapsed in on itself with a loud boom, many were caught unawares.

“The real tragedy is there was ample time to move out, warnings telling them to do so and places that they could move into,” SLRCS’s Abeyratne said.

Gaps in early warning

Why did so many stay put in such eminent danger? That is the gnawing question that many assisting the relief effort are now trying to answer.

Gaps in the early warning mechanism have been identified since the disaster.

The main culprit seems to be the lack of an apex authority in control of local warnings, dissemination, evacuations and the absence of a rehearsed evacuation plan, despite the very real danger of landslides in the area.

Shanthi Jayasekera, the head of the Haldumulla Divisional Secretariat, told reporters that even though warnings had been issued there were no clear instructions on evacuations.

In other parts of Sri Lanka, especially along the coast devastated by the 2004 Asia tsunami, there are rehearsed and tested evacuation and early warning plans.

There are DMC units stationed at each of the country’s 25 districts, spread across its nine provinces, tasked with local coordination of such efforts, while the police and armed forces are used to disseminate warnings and handle mass evacuations.

The last such evacuation took place two-and-a-half years back in April 2012 when over a million left their homes along the coast after a tsunami warning.

Evacuation drills and rehearsals are carried out by the DMC every three months, but none seemed to have covered the Meeriyabedda area.

Less than ten days before the landslide, on Oct. 23, the DMC carried out landslide evacuations drills in six districts including Badulla, but unfortunately Meeriyabedda was not among those chosen.

“There was no such plan here, no one knew where to move out to and how to do it; [most] importantly there was no one, no authority, that was taking the lead,” Sarath Lal Kumara, DMC’s spokesperson, told IPS.

“What we should have had is a government agency-led early warning dissemination plan and an evacuation map,” he said.

Such systems do exist elsewhere in the country. According to Abeyratne, SLRCS’s trained volunteer groups work alongside the DMC and local public bodies, as well as the police and armed forces, during emergencies.

“It is a complex system, but it is a system that has been tested [in] real time here [in Sri Lanka] and has worked,” he said. In fact, SLRCS volunteers were among the first to reach the landslide-affected area this past Wednesday.

Perhaps one of the biggest gaps in the disaster management plan for the area was the failure to take into account the socio-economic conditions of those living in landslide-prone areas.

DMC’s Kumara told IPS said that most of the residents and victims were poor workers earning meager wages at nearby tea plantations.

Seneviratne added that the plantation workers are of Indian origin, descendents of those brought by British colonialists to work on the estates about 200 years ago.

The homes that were destroyed were not really houses, but one-room blocks, a dozen to a row, popularly known as ‘line houses’.

The majority of estate residents have lived this way for generations, earning a living by picking tea, tapping rubber or stripping cinnamon. They are entirely dependent on the plantations to which they belong.

A regional plantation company, Maskeliya Plantations Limited, owns the land where the deadly landslide took place. Three days after the landslide the military had to intervene to prevent villagers from assaulting officials of the company at the landslide site.

Sri Lanka’s disaster preparedness levels have improved from a barebones structure a decade ago, when the tsunami left 35,000 dead or missing. Since then it has been a steep learning curve on how to face up to the challenges of frequent extreme weather events.

“It is a situation that needs careful evaluation, not stopgap solutions,” Seneviratne said.

“Each disaster is a lesson on what can be done better, how to save lives,” SLRCS’s Abeyratne added.

If anyone needs a stark reminder on how important these lessons can be, just look up the mountainside at Meeriyabedda – or what is left of it.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Twice in 20 months, dozens of fishermen have perished in shallow waters off the Sri Lankan coast due to the absence of an early warning system. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

It was several hours before dawn when Afthas Niflal, a young fisherman in southern Sri Lanka, felt the sea start to rumble beneath him.

He was no stranger to the shallow waters off the fishing harbour in Beruwala, a small coastal town in the Kalutara District, about 50 km south of the island’s capital, Colombo, but nothing could have prepared him for what he experienced on the morning of Jun. 8.

“It was like the sea rose up, taking my boat with it,” the young man told IPS three days after his harrowing encounter. “Then the wind picked up and began tossing us around like sticks.”

Within minutes, a gigantic wave had topped the small boat, pitching Niflal and his companion into the stormy waters. He estimates that it was about 2.30 a.m. when they ended up hanging for dear life on to the sides of the capsized fishing craft.

“It was pitch dark, we could not see anything and the sea was howling like a deranged monster,” he said. When an Air Force helicopter finally picked them up nearly six hours later, the two exhausted men had all but given up hope.

Once safely back on land, they learned that gale force winds, which have become increasingly common in this South Asian island nation, had left 51 fishermen dead, while 16 were still missing out at sea.

Although it took many people by surprise, the tragedy this past weekend was not the first time in recent months that unsuspecting fisher folk have lost their lives to sudden and savage turns in the weather. This time, though, the loss of life has shed a critical light on the government’s early warning system – or lack thereof.

Vague communiqués

On Nov. 25, 2011, 29 fishermen in almost the same areas perished when furious winds tore through the southern coast, rousing the shallow waters into a deadly tempest. Eleven of those who lost their lives hailed from the village of Kaparatota, about 60 km south of Beruwela.

But the incident failed to spur the government into action. According to Niflal, none of the fishermen out on the sea on the morning of Jun. 8 received any communication or warning that the weather would turn rough.

Most traditional fishermen in Sri Lanka rely on weather bulletins carried on national TV or radio stations. Often, their best chance for communication is via mobile phones that have patchy coverage up to several kilometres out at sea.

But fishermen say updates from the Sri Lanka Meteorological Department are “annoyingly cryptic” at the best of times.

Three days after the most recent storm, for instance, the department noted: “A few showers will occur in the Western, Sabaragamuwa, Central and Southern provinces”, but failed to specify the consequences of fishermen heading out to sea.

The Department’s website released its storm warning at three in the morning on Jun. 8, by which time, according to survivors, the winds had already swept inland, leaving hapless fishermen struggling in the water.

At a time when extreme and erratic weather has become the norm in Sri Lanka, these ambiguous updates are nothing short of fatal.

“We are looking into means of improving our capacity and our forecasting resources,” S H Kariyawasam, director-general of the Meteorological Department, told IPS, adding that for the past 15 months the Department has been constructing a new and improved radar, known as the Doppler Radar, capable of detecting fast moving weather systems and providing detailed forecasts on the quantity of rainfall.

Other experts say that even if they had received red alerts, fishermen, like most of their countrymen and women, would not have had the knowledge or capacity to seek safer conditions.

Sri Lanka’s early warning system, built from scratch after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami that claimed 30,000 unsuspecting lives, is focused on tsunami alerts, while the mass media lacks experience in effectively communicating weather-related information.

There is also an urgent need for public awareness campaigns across Sri Lanka’s coastal belt, to educate fishers on how to respond to alerts when they come.

Meanwhile, the agency tasked with public dissemination of warnings under the 2005 Disaster Management Act, the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), says it never received a formal alarm from the Meteorological Department, and was therefore unable to spread the word ahead.

Ironically, just a fortnight prior to the latest tragedy, confident DMC officials told IPS that the country’s disaster preparedness levels were adequate to meet the challenges of increasingly fitful monsoon rains, which have wreaked havoc across Sri Lanka in the last year.

In November and December of 2012, torrential downpours left nearly 530,000 people stranded, 43 people dead and nearly 20,000 homes either damaged or completely destroyed.

Forecasts for the coming months indicate no change in these patterns, suggesting the urgent need for a hard reckoning with the country’s existing mechanisms, which were found seriously wanting last weekend when coastal communities were woken not by a national disaster alert but by the roar of 100-kmph winds barreling in from the sea.

In fact, some authorities in towns like Beruwala would not even have known that hundreds of fishermen were caught in the gale had it not been for a school teacher living close to the harbour, who phoned the nearest police station when it became clear that the storm was not a passing gust of wind.

In other coastal towns like Dehiwala and Rathmalana, about 10 km south of Colombo, residents furious at the delay in launching rescue operations barricaded the main coastal rail line with their boats, refusing to budge until Navy boats and Air Force choppers were mobilised in an official search for the missing.

It was one of these choppers that subsequently found and rescued Niflal and at least ten other survivors last weekend.

Confronted by a wave of outrage on the streets and in the media, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed a committee comprised of retired weather specialists to look into the tragedy and report to him “the reasons as to why affected people were not informed of the impending severe weather conditions in order to be able to take precautionary measures.”

Although such retrospective measures come too late for those who lost their lives, they may end up preventing unnecessary deaths in the future.

The gathering rain clouds in the Sri Lankan skies are a source of trepidation for many. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, May 28 2013 (IPS)

The monsoon in Sri Lanka is always a much-awaited event. There is something about the sight of the gathered clouds, the washed trees and the drenched landscape that stirs romance even in the most hardened of souls.

The monsoon rain now comes to Sri Lanka mostly in short bursts, lasting some 15 minutes, accompanied by thunder. One minute it could be calm and sunny, the very next, winds could pick up, the delicate coconut palms sway dangerously and the heavens descend.

The short bursts of rain are a common scenario in the western plains. It is only when the rains decide to stay longer that their beauty recedes and the beast takes over.

Cities and villages get flooded, roads are jammed and thousands are left stranded, sometimes for days.

The island nation has had a brush with this scenario already this year, when Cyclone Mahasen swept past its eastern cost, leaving eight people dead, over 100,000 stranded and over 2,000 structures damaged.

There are also few who can erase the memory of the Dec. 2004 tsunami that left 35,000 people dead and close to a million displaced.

That disaster struck Sri Lanka hard, because there was no warning system in place.

The tragedy left the nation wiser, and one of the first things it did in the aftermath was to spruce up its early warning system and disaster mitigation effort.

“We are used to the monsoon and cyclones now and, more importantly, we are better prepared than ever before,” Sarath Lal Kumara, deputy director at the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), told IPS.

The DMC came into being in August 2005 as the nodal agency for disaster risk management in the country under the National Council for Disaster Management (NCDM), which later became the ministry of disaster management and human rights.

Each of Sri Lanka’s over 300 divisional secretariats further has a regional disaster management committee, the lowest administrative body in the government’s disaster management system. Every unit has a separate budget allocation for emergencies; funds are also allocated on a case-by-case basis by capital Colombo.

The DMC too has its own disaster management units in each of Sri Lanka’s 25 districts that make up the country’s nine provinces. Colombo once again coordinates their activities, but every unit has a senior manager of its own as head.

“They are stationed in the regions so that we can take quick decisions without having to go back and forth,” said Kumara. The units have also been provided with the resources to disseminate early warnings and coordinate initial rescue and relief work, he added.

Other non-governmental organisations too have upgraded their disaster monitoring and assistance capacities. The Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, for instance, has district-level disaster management units and routinely mobilises thousands of its volunteers in early warning and relief work.

Staffers and volunteers also go through regular refresher courses on disaster preparedness. All of which came in handy, most recently when Cyclone Mahasen struck Sri Lanka.

“I think we are in a better position than we ever were to meet natural disasters,” Bob McKerrow, head of a delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), told IPS.

It is just as well that Sri Lanka is investing some resources in early warning and preparedness, say experts. South Asia, they warn, will be subjected to a barrage of extreme weather events, and will have to deal with them on a long-term priority basis.

Over 25 million people have been displaced in the region between 2011 and 2012 due to natural disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva.

Millions are at risk in South Asia due to extreme weather events, Bart Édes, director of the poverty reduction, gender and social development division in the Asian Development Bank (ADB), told IPS.

“All around South Asia,” he said, “in addition to the current vulnerability to cyclones, flooding and drought, those living along South Asian coastlines confront the slowly rising seas.”

With millions affected by disasters, already stretched resources like water, healthcare, schools and other infrastructure can collapse under renewed pressure, Édes added.

“Environmental migration is exacerbating the urbanisation trend being witnessed across South Asia,” the ADB official told IPS. “The physical and social infrastructure of many cities is already stretched to capacity.” As a result, climate-related migration was becoming a serious issue in the region, he added.

A recent study by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Sri Lankan ministries of disaster management and economic development on the impact of the December 2012-January 2013 flooding offered a glimpse into the scale of damage that natural disasters can inflict.

Titled the ‘Rapid Flood Assessment Report’, it noted that over half a million people in Sri Lanka’s northern, north central, eastern, southern and northwestern regions were affected in early January by the flooding.

They have, in fact, been hit by a double whammy, as 67 per cent of the flood victims surveyed said they were also impacted by the 10-month drought preceding the floods.

An earlier assessment by the IFRC in November 2012 had put the number of drought-affected in Sri Lanka at over 1.2 million.

The WFP report also found 37 per cent of the households surveyed were severely ‘food insecure’ and 44 per cent were ‘borderline food insecure’. And the bulk of those who bore the brunt of the twin disasters were employed either in agriculture or in casual jobs.

“Loss of livelihoods, extreme poverty and losses to cultivation are the key drivers of food insecurity, among the flood-affected households,” the report noted. It also pointed to the fact that over 67 per cent of the flood-affected lived below the poverty line.

DMC’s Kumara cited anecdotal evidence to suggest that these victims of disasters were moving into cities, especially when harvests failed, looking for an income.

“We cannot stop natural events, we cannot alter them,” Kumara said. “What we can do is to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. God willing, we are on that track.”

Ask Kusumlatha Tammitta, who lives in the remote village of Mamaduwa in the Vavuniya district of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, if this is enough, and she tells you that what they really need is better, accurate forecasting that will indicate how the monsoon will be.

Till that is available, people like her are condemned to live at the very edge of existence.