It is difficult to reach Niranga Ranasinghe by phone. The cardboard recycler lives in a flooded area in the southwest of Sri Lanka. The streets of his village Yabaraluwa are no longer flooded but are covered by a thick layer of mud. Moreover, it still rains often and heavily, even though Cyclone Ditwah, which hit the South Asian island last weekend, moved on days ago.
On Thursday, more than 130 millimeters of rain fell in fifteen hours in the province where Ranasinghe lives. Telecommunications and electricity supplies are not yet completely stable. Telephone poles toppled in floods, bridges and roads were washed away in the natural disaster.
“Our house is in bad shape,” Ranasinghe said in a message he sent to NRC sent. “The water was almost two meters high. It smells very bad.” Fortunately, Ranasinghe (42), his wife and his two-and-a-half-year-old twin daughters were rescued when the Kelani River overflowed its banks.
His parents live nearby but just outside the area that flooded. Because his brother’s family also moved to the parental home, two families and the grandparents now live there together in three rooms. “Getting back home is now our biggest concern – how we recover. With two small children it is very difficult now.” Ranasinghe recycles cardboard, his wife works in a clothing factory to make ends meet.
Risk of landslides
The death toll from Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka stood at 486 on Friday, with 341 people still missing who may have been swept away by the floods or trapped in collapsed buildings. Across the country, about 1.4 million people have been affected by the disaster, according to the World Health Organization. There are still 170,000 people in reception centers who cannot yet return home on the advice of the National Disaster Management Agency (DMC): there is still a high risk of new landslides because the ground is saturated with water.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared a state of emergency to deal with the consequences of Cyclone Ditwah. Officials and Sri Lankan media are calling this natural disaster worse than the tsunami that hit the island in 2004. At the time, mainly coastal areas were affected, but the tropical storm has now affected almost the entire island.
Dissanayake stated this week that money will be made available for cleaning work in homes (an amount of 25,000 Sri Lankan rupees, about 70 euros). The government estimates the total reconstruction six to seven billion dollars. Sri Lanka went through a severe economic crisis three years ago.
Nearly all South Asian neighbors – India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Maldives and Pakistan – have pledged humanitarian aid. Help is also coming from further afield, from the United Kingdom and Australia.
Officials released
But in the meantime, the Sri Lankan government is under fire. On Friday, November 28, the day Ditwah made landfall on the eastern coast, officials were given time off so they did not have to walk the streets in the storm. Emergency services did work, but this meant that residents with requests for help were unable to reach local officials.
That stings even more, says the well-known Sri Lankan journalist Dilrukshi Hantunttiin in a widely shared opinion piece, because cyclones are not an unknown phenomenon around this time of year. In fact, in mid-November, the Director General of the National Department of Meteorology warned of severe weather ahead during a TV appearance. Two days before the cyclone hit Sri Lanka, the storm was observed in the Bay of Bengalby the Indian Weather Service.
Critics argue that the government made insufficient preparations. Like policy researcher Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu tell Deutsche Wellet: “This disaster has exposed significant shortcomings in the preparedness and responsiveness of our disaster mechanisms.”
Distress signals not in second language
When a state of emergency was declared over the weekend, most information was distributed in Sinhala, one of the official languages in Sri Lanka. But much less emergency information was available in the second language Tamil, spoken in the equally affected north of the country. the local newspaper noted Tamil Guardian and then a media researcher. There was anger on social media about this deprivation of the Tamil minority group.
Ranasinghe sends his message to NRC on Thursday, December 4. “We have been in this situation since November 29,” he says: “So far we have not received any help from the government.” The family decided to evacuate themselves that Saturday. “Until the Kelani River started to flood, no one had heard an official warning or call for evacuation. Neighbors and friends helped us get the children and belongings to my parents’ house.”
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