Cyclone Ditwah and Sri Lanka’s disastrous flood mismanagement
IN JANUARY 2011, I interviewed V Vallipulle as she waited for transport to her home in Vavunathivu in Batticaloa, on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka. She had eaten nothing but boiled potatoes provided by her grama sevaka (local government office) for days. More aid had been promised but had not yet arrived. On that same trip, I met S Indra Kumar, a farmer from Eachchanthivu. He showed us his paddy field, holding up a handful of dead stalks. “All my grain is gone,” he said. I interviewed people as they catalogued their losses: missing fishing boats, damaged nets and cracked walls that would take hundreds of thousands of rupees to repair. These people in Batticaloa had survived the 2004 tsunami and Sri Lanka’s civil war. The floods were just another disaster they had to endure. The report I filed for the Sunday Leader newspaper on 13 January noted that more than half a million people had been impacted by flooding in Batticaloa district alone, with over 160,000 people living in camps.
Memories from those days almost 15 years ago flashed through my mind as my neighbours rushed into my house on 28 November to help my family move our furniture in case of flooding. By this time, 56 people had already lost their lives in Cyclone Ditwah, which made landfall in Sri Lanka early on 28 November. Most of those who had died were from Kandy in the Central Province and from Badulla in the neighbouring Uva Province. That night, I packed a bag as my sister and I argued with my mother about whether or not we should leave. Our lane floods often, as we live next to a canal.
Though the rain had stopped in our area at around 10 pm on 28 November, floodwater from the elevations of the Central Province was still rushing down towards Colombo. At 1 pm, the Irrigation Department sent out a red notice warning that “during the next 24 hours, a High-Risk Flood Situation, of a level not experienced in recent history, may occur in the low-lying areas of the Kelani River Valley.” An earlier notice had warned people in several areas near rivers, including Colombo, to evacuate.
We learnt most of this from social media, through updates from journalists and government agencies like the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), the Department of Meteorology and the Irrigation Department of Sri Lanka. Initially, the alerts from government agencies were mostly in Sinhala, and later on, in both Sinhala and English. As in the past, there were few timely alerts in Tamil, because the DMC did not have full-time staff who could speak the language. The call for volunteers who could speak “multiple languages” went out only on the evening of Saturday, 29 November.
This was depressingly familiar to me as a reporter having covered the impacts of flooding in 2011, 2016 (in which 104 people died due to flooding and landslides) and in 2017 (in which 213 people died). Each time, I recalled Tamil-speaking citizens asking why there were no alerts in Tamil, with the DMC asking for volunteers far too late. It was once again a potent reminder that, even 16 years after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, Tamil citizens’ lives remain dispensable to the Sri Lankan state.
Cyclone Ditwah has wrought havoc in the areas where the country’s most vulnerable live. On 3 December, the government declared 22 out of 25 districts as “national disaster areas”. As of 3 December, areas in the Northern Province like Mullaitivu were in need of dry rations and hygiene items, while in Jaffna there was an emerging need for mosquito nets, soap and cleaning liquids as the water receded. Other areas such as Muttur in the Eastern Province were in need of cooked food, mosquito nets and bedsheets.
These provinces remain deeply impacted by the civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Then the rains came. In Mullaitivu, where the final phase of the war was fought, bridges have been damaged and town supply lines broken, while roads in Mannar have been submerged. In Batticaloa and Muttur, causeways and bridges have been submerged, leaving villagers unable to reach markets and hospitals. While the DMC shows fewer families impacted in the north and east of Sri Lanka, the full extent of the damage is still unknown as rescuers are only just beginning to reach them.
The cities of Kandy and Gampola in the Central Province have also been cut off for days due to landslides and heavy rain. Among those badly impacted are Malaiyaha Tamils working on tea estates, with footage showing line houses being buried by landslides. Even prior to the cyclone, Malaiyaha Tamils faced poverty, food insecurity and discrimination. Their precarity will only deepen in the aftermath of cyclone Ditwah.
Several of the worst-affected regions were hit by prolonged power outages and shortages of drinking water. Damaged communication towers meant that many areas also had no phone signal for days, leaving people frantic with worry as they tried to contact missing family members. Compounding the damage, more rain is expected thanks to the northeast monsoon, with fairly heavy rainfall of over 50 millimetres forecast across the Northern, North-Central, Eastern and Uva provinces and in the Matale district.
As of 4 December, 481 people have died across Sri Lanka, with 345 more missing and hundreds of thousands displaced.
Sri Lankan citizens were quick to mobilise. Over the past few days, a slew of community kitchens and donation drives have been set up. A group of volunteers built a flood-rescue database, floodsupport.org, allowing people to call for help or check on missing relatives. Coffee shops and supermarkets opened their doors for people to charge their mobile phones. The inmates of Welikada Prison in Colombo donated the dry rations meant for their lunch to those impacted by flooding.
These community initiatives exist partly because government agencies have, in the past, been slow to sound alarms and respond to crises. On 12 November, the director general of Sri Lanka’s Department of Meteorology, Athula Karunanayake, said a low-pressure area was forming in the Bay of Bengal and called for a joint mechanism to address heavy rain. The first red alerts predicting very heavy rainfall were released on the night of 25 November. The next day, the president Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s main updates on Facebook were about a meeting with film producers and distributors, and another with Road Development Authority engineers. It was only the morning of 27 November that Dissanayake joined an emergency meeting on flooding as the rain developed into a cyclonic storm; this was also when people living in the most affected areas were first alerted to the possibility of heavy rain and strong winds.
While government agencies had been watching the storm develop in order to put out timely alerts, the next few days – and the government’s response to a rapidly developing disaster – would prove to be crucial.
The government announced a special holiday for all government offices on 28 November due to bad weather, assuring the public that essential services and disaster relief services would continue. When people tried to contact their grama niladhari (public official) and divisional secretariats for emergency support, they found the offices closed.
Activists said local government officers were reluctant to make emergency purchases including bread, medicine and cooked meals on credit, worried they might later be summoned by investigative commissions for bypassing normal procedures while on leave. In a televised meeting on disaster relief on 30 November, senior health officials pleaded for critical support for hospitals in affected areas, while the health minister Nalinda Jayatissa seemed unprepared with any solutions.
On 29 November, Dissanayake declared a state of emergency, publishing regulations that granted the military considerable powers for arrest and detention, criminalised critique of public services, and prohibited not just the spread of misinformation and disinformation but also content deemed “prejudicial” to public order and public security – broad provisions that could easily be used to crack down on dissent. In this, Dissanayake followed the example of former presidents Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe, who both used emergency regulations as tools to curb freedom of expression in times of crisis. Lawyers pointed out that whole sections of the emergency regulations appeared to have been copied from those issued by Wickremesinghe in May 2022 after mass protests around Sri Lanka’s economic crisis.