‘It has been eight days. They can’t stay there’: Sri Lanka’s hill country communities wiped out by landslides
Eight days after a week of torrential rain and then a cyclone set loose landslides in the famed hill country of Kandy, devastated residents are left to rely on sympathetic strangers to recover the bodies of their loved ones.
The evening gloom is settling as half a dozen men from Nilamba village tie ropes around the shrouded body of a 13-year-old boy just recovered from the ruins of a close-knit community that lost 11 loved ones and 21 homes when a landslide enveloped their little patch of mountain in Sri Lanka’s famed hill country of Kandy.
A soldier stationed at the foot of the village ensures that no one stays the night in an area that remains vulnerable to landslips, eight days after a week of torrential rain and then a cyclone set loose the mountain above them.
But there is no other sign of the state here as men curl strips of corrugated iron around the teenage boy and the bodies of two other men, aged 24 and 50, who have just been hauled from the mud with the help of a backhoe paid for by a sympathetic stranger.
Six people have been recovered from Nilamba but five still lie somewhere under the mud, including Gopal Vasanthan’s sister, her sister’s son and little girl. Without radar equipment or sniffer dogs to help locate the bodies, the work is agonisingly slow.
“Please help us get these three bodies out,” Ms Vasanthan pleads as we watch the men struggle to carry the bodies down a slippery hillside to a nearby cemetery.
“It has been eight days today. They can’t stay there. Just help us. Please!”
A single backhoe has been working the site courtesy of a local architect, Shashi Haran, who came to see the site four days after the November 27 landslide and was shocked that no search and rescue teams were there to help.
“People were begging for help. It was December 1 and no one had come,” he tells The Australian. “One woman pleaded with me ‘let me see my husband’s face one last time’.
“I wanted to help get the bodies out to console those who were grieving. But also, if we don’t remove these bodies it will be a disaster because the water will become a contaminated flow to villages downstream.”
Mr Haran has been ringing government officials asking for search and rescue equipment to help with the task but each time he is told there is none available.
“We will try again tomorrow (to find the bodies) but I can’t keep doing this every day. I need some support,” he says.
Along Kandy’s high, narrow roads, communities stricken by floods and landslides that have also devastated every corner of Sri Lanka have erected signs appealing for aid.
All 25 provinces have been affected, though Kandy – a valuable tourism centre and the vegetable basket of a country still grappling with hunger three years after its economic collapse – has been hardest hit with a local death toll of more than 120.
At least 486 people have now died since Cyclone Ditwah hit Sri Lanka on November 27, 341 are missing, 220,000 people have been displaced and more than a million affected.
But across South and Southeast Asia, the collective death toll from extreme regional monsoonal rains and a confluence of three almost simultaneous tropical cyclones – Ditwah, Senyar and Koto – in recent weeks has now climbed past 1500.
In Indonesia, where Senyar smashed into Sumatra island on November 26, 836 have died, hundreds are still missing, and countless communities are also still cut off. In Thailand, at least 160 have died from floods and landslides triggered by the same storm front, while Ditwah is now also causing widespread flooding in southern India.
Jakarta has insisted it does not need international aid, but Sri Lanka has declared a national emergency and appealed for help to deal with a fresh crisis it is in no position to handle alone.
Senior officials estimate the recovery bill could be as high as $US7bn ($10.5bn), almost a tenth of the country’s annual GDP, and that the damage to the country’s infrastructure could be 10 times that caused by the 2004 tsunami that killed 40,000 people along Sri Lanka’s coastlines, but did not affect the entire country as Cyclone Ditwah has done.
Some 483 dams and 1936 canals have been damaged, along with two thirds of the country’s rail track, including the fabled Kandy line – hailed as the world’s most beautiful train ride. It could be months before all services are restored.
More than 56,000 hectares of farmland has been destroyed, and 4863 power substations are still down.
International aid and rescue and recovery teams have been dribbling in from India, Pakistan, Japan, Nepal and Australia, which has so far pledged $5m in recovery funding. The International Monetary Fund, which provided a $US2.9bn bailout fund in 2023, has said it too is “looking at options to further support Sri Lanka”.
The government is working hard to re-establish electricity and communications, decontaminate wells and reopen roads blocked by the hundreds of landslides that have occurred along vast swathes of the country’s central heartland.
More than 31,000 people have been rescued, 28,500 military forces deployed across the country, and 19,000 overseas Sri Lankans have contributed to a recovery fund, it said on Thursday.
But in village after devastated village around Kandy district, communities appear to be fending for themselves.
In Alawathugoda, among the worst affected communities, a lone excavator on Thursday worked to clear a road around the village of neat white homes that cling to the hillside above what – until last week – was a valley of forest, rice paddies and vegetable farms.
More than 40 people died in the massive landslide which occurred just after midnight on November 29. As many as 30 are believed still entombed in mud.
Among the crowds who have come to see for themselves the deep muddy scar that runs all the way down the mountain and along a valley now thick with mud, a little girl with perfect English tells The Australian her family lost eight relatives in the disaster.
She points to an area midway down the muddy rise where leafy branches stuck upright in the ground mark the makeshift graves of her extended family.
Relatives in the valley had moved up the hill to another family home to escape the floods only to be wiped out by the landslide.
“They thought they would be safer on the mountain with our other relatives,” she says.
Local labourer Farzan Shahabdi tells The Australian he was lying awake in the dark listening to cyclonic winds and rain when he heard “big sounds, like a helicopter trying to land on the mountain”.
The government issued warnings ahead of the storm, but with electricity and phone lines down there was no one to pass the message on.
“I was the first to come when the landslide happened,” Mr Shahabdi says. “I was sure it would affect my brother’s house but it affected everything.”
With his brother working in Qatar to keep the family afloat, his sister-in-law had taken her four daughters to her mother’s house down the hill to ride out the storm.
Hours later the landslide sheered off the front of the house, and buried his 13-year-old niece Anuha and her grandmother as they slept.
“They’re still buried there. They can’t retrieve the bodies because if they try to take them out the whole slab will come down,” he says.
Inside that house, clogged with mud and perched precariously on the edge of a new cliff, relatives and neighbours work quickly to save family items.
“We can’t live here anymore,” says Mohamad Imtias Mohamad, Anuha’s 21-year-old brother.
He hopes they can recover the bodies when the house is finally demolished.
While most agree the recent landslides are an unprecedented event, they have become a more frequent event in Kandy as rising population levels threaten the carrying capacity of a fragile mountain district.
Wasantha Senadeera, a senior scientist with Sri Lanka’s National Building Research Organisation, estimates 34 per cent of the district’s population now lives in high-risk, landslide-prone areas.
Ditwah was a wake-up call to the nation, he said this week.
Recriminations have already begun against the country’s underprepared post-tsunami Disaster Management Centre, and of a government ill-equipped for a disaster of this scale – albeit one that barely 12 months ago inherited a basket case economy.
A popular criticism is that irrigation managers did not relieve pressure on reservoirs and dams ahead of extreme rain that had been forecast a week out.
Sri Lankan science commentator Nalaka Gunawardene says it is routine to release water in stages ahead of such events, but “they didn’t act in time for reasons that need to be in investigated”.
Instead, water was released just as the reservoirs in the hill country were filling up, aggravating flooding that was already happening as a result of heavy rainfall.
At Sri Lanka’s sodden ground level, however, millions of Sri Lankans are just trying to grapple with the scale of their loss.
An hour before he is to bury his family, Harsh Madhushan leads us through the by-lanes of another beautiful Kandy village lined with palm trees and wild jasmine and up to a raised quagmire where his ancestral home stood for more than a century before it too was wiped out last week by a hillside that could no longer hold.
The young soldier had been rescuing flood victims in Vavuniya – a northern town that became a byword for war crimes committed in the brutal final stages of Sri Lanka’s 27-year civil war – when he learned his parents, brother, grandmother and two uncles had all perished.
Only his nine-year-old sister survived, ferried to the safety of her aunt’s house nearby by his younger brother who returned to gather belongings and take his parents onto flat ground.
When they didn’t arrive as expected, his grandfather rushed up the hill to check on them.
“My father told him, ‘don’t come, the mountain is moving’.”
Minutes later they were gone.
“I spoke to my dad 15 minutes before it happened,” Madhushan says, choking back tears.
“He said there was nothing to worry about (and) they would come down for safety.”
His father told him he had been clearing ground in the garden so they could build a house for him, together.
They were to lay the foundations later this month, when he returned for the holidays.
Additional reporting: Susitha Fernando
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout