Alerting Sri Lankans to danger of disaster

EARLY ACTION THIS SEASON HELPED SAVE MORE LIVES THAN IN THE PAST

SRI LANKA’S weather and dis­aster offices have, for years, faced criticism for not providing adequate early warning about extreme weather – a problem that may have contributed to widespread deaths and dis­placement from mudslides and flooding, critics say.

But this year that is changing, with government agencies issu­ing a series of early warning alerts about potential threats.

On May 22, the Disaster Man­agement Centre put out a land­slide warning, relayed from the National Building Research Or­ganisation, that reached scores of landslide-prone villages in the districts of Rathnapura, Kalutara, Kegalle and Nuwera Eliya.

Many families temporarily left their homes in response.

“There was no landslide in our village, but we felt safe staying away from the area and also that someone was monitoring the sit­uation,” said Mariamma Sival­ingama, 40, a plantation worker who lives in Nuwera Eliya.

Brenda Barton, the head of the World Food Programme in Sri Lanka, said government depart­ments and other agencies held meetings in the two weeks before the expected arrival of monsoon rains to try to prepare for poten­tial threats.

The government “took a num­ber of concerted steps to height­en preparedness before the mon­soon season, including mobilis­ing response teams in advance and establishing mechanisms to ensure the security and safety of evacuated people and their as­sets,” Barton revealed.

“This year early warning infor­mation was more widely and regularly disseminated,” she said.

One significant change this year was that agencies such as the Disaster Management Centre and the Red Cross began issuing effective mobile phone warnings.

“Everyone was on SMS, the messages were really fast and re­ally well linked,” said Sudath Ma­dugalle, who oversees early warning and flood relief efforts as deputy general director of the Sri Lanka Red Cross.

The flooding last month did leave over 150,000 marooned by floodwater and 23 deaths were reported. But the damages and the fatalities were far lower than in 2016 and 2017.

In 2016, a landslide left over 200 villagers missing and pre­sumed dead in the Aranayake ar­ea of Kegalle District. At that time, the Disaster Management Centre came under criticism for lack of an effective network to disseminate early warnings.

That year, the National Build­ing Research Organisation had issued a warning of a possible landslide, but there was no effec­tive mechanism set up to get the warning to the villagers in dan­ger, residents and government of­ficials in the area said.

This time, government and Red Cross officials used a range of official and private networks to get warnings out, with the Disas­ter Management Centre also sending out police to warn re­mote villages, Madugalle said.

The centre also used social media – particularly Facebook and Twitter – to provide updates on risks and issue warnings, while the meteorological depart­ment updated its online rain maps every three hours.

“Comparatively, this time we were able to be a bit more proac­tive,” said Duminda Dissanayake, the government minister in charge of disaster management.

Madugalle said that authori­ties still need to work on building community awareness about dis­aster threats, however. (Thomson Reuters Foundation)