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Local committees step in with flood relief

Eighty-year old M Emmalin inspects her washed away home in Palindanuwara, Sri Lanka. Amantha Perera/IRIN

"The water just kept coming and coming," M Emmalin, 80, said, standing in the ruins of her two-room house.

"For three days the stream was rising; first the water came over the sides, then through the door and rose all the way, almost to the rafters," she said, describing what she called the worst floods of her life. "Then suddenly there was a huge noise and the house collapsed."

Her house is in Palindanuwara, a town about 100km southeast of the capital Colombo, which was hit by floods caused by torrential monsoon rains between 1 and 3 June.

More than 29,400 people from 7,400 families were affected in the Palindanuwara Division, comprising 45 smaller administrative units, according to the National Disaster Relief Services Centre (NDRSC), the main government body coordinating disaster relief operations.

Six people died during the floods and 150 houses were destroyed, while an additional 200 were damaged in Palindanuwara.

Emmalin has been used to periodic flooding during heavy rains when the many streams that crisscross the region overflow, but she never feared being washed away by floods.

"This was the biggest one I have ever seen in my life," she said, staring at the half-destroyed walls.

Relief efforts

By the time Emmalin's house was flooding, a large disaster relief effort was already under way at the local level, according to Sirisoma Lokuwitarana, divisional secretary for Palindanuwara, the highest-ranking government officer in the division. He told IRIN the rains were such that there was no doubt of impending floods and waiting for outside help would have spelt more disaster.

"We knew when the rains came that there was trouble and got village-level disaster committees to gather people at safer locations."

Village and town disaster committees took the lead in organising people into safer areas, such as schools and temples. The committees made use of local transport facilities, including buses and trucks, to move people.

"My living quarters just came down with the rains," Walakada Mahinda Tissa, a Buddhist monk, said. "I moved into the other building where we hold classes and sermons, and when people started coming we took them in." Two weeks after the floods he was still providing shelter to two families whose homes had been washed away.

Lack of resources

Lokuwitarana said that rather than waiting until help arrived from Colombo, he obtained boats and earth-moving machinery from government and private organisations in nearby divisions, Kalutara and Banadaragama.


Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN
Many flood-prone areas such as Palindanuwara need to be better prepared

"Some roads were cut off by the floods and there were a lot of mud slides. We had to get going as fast as we could." He also obtained the help of a tourist hotel run by the Army in Palindanuwara to provide cooked meals till rations arrived.

Lokuwitarana said the floods had shown everyone the need to be better prepared.

"We could have used the time we spent on organising the relief to help the victims if we had the resources like boats and earth-moving machinery close at hand," he told IRIN.

He has asked the government for at least two boats, an earth-moving machine and cooking utensils to cope with future disasters.

Irrigation officials in Colombo also agreed that flood-prone areas such as Palindanuwara needed to be better prepared.

"These areas [like Palindanuwara] are in the flood basins of rivers. Unfortunately they are now heavily populated," BK Jayasundera, senior deputy director at the Irrigation Department in charge of flood protection, told IRIN. "Due to road construction and other developments, the likelihood of flooding has increased."

Early warning

The inhabitants also told IRIN they would feel safer if they received warnings of impending floods well in advance, allowing them to move out faster.

Despite warnings issued by the Meteorological and Irrigation departments, none reached Palindanuwara before the floods, according to local officials.

The only official warning was issued by officials at the Kukule Ganga dam, a hydroelectric generating dam near Palindanuwara, according to locals.

"It was more like a call to get out of the way," said Tissa. "Officials came and told some households close to the river that they were going to open the dam sluice gates and to get out of the way of the gushing waters."

Emmalin said that if they knew in advance of impending floods, they could make decisions quicker rather than evaluating the strength of swelling waters. "People can then move to locations that do not get cut off; the way the waters came this time we thought we would be isolated for days."

NDRSC officials also said they would be looking into issuing warnings faster. "That is something we have to look at, how to get the message across to those in danger areas as fast as we can," GM Gunewardena, assistant director at the NDRSC, told IRIN.

ap/mw


This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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