Sri Lanka caught out by devastating cyclone despite warnings
Twin cyclones have so far claimed at least 1150 people lives across four countries – Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia – and devastated thousands of communities.
The weather warnings were as clear as they were dire.
A week before two tropical cyclones rampaged across the Indian Ocean rim, meteorology bureaus in Sri Lanka and Indonesia were sounding the alarm over the impending storms.
But by the time Cyclone Senyar made landfall in Sumatra on Wednesday, and Cyclone Ditwah made landfall in Sri Lanka on Thursday – dumping as much as one quarter of the annual rainfall in less than 48 hours in some areas and sparking deadly landslides and flooding nationwide – it was clear authorities had been caught unaware.
The twin storms have so far claimed at least 1150 people lives across four countries – Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Malaysia – and devastated thousands of communities.
In Sri Lanka at least 390 have died and 350 are still missing in what authorities have said is the worst natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
“The tsunami deaths were much higher – 35,000 killed and 5000 unaccounted for – but the tsunami affected only the coastal areas so the rest of the country could actually support the relief and rescue,” Sri Lankan science commentator Nalaka Gunawardene told The Australian.
“This time all 25 districts of the country have been affected to some degree so the ability to help one another is diminished because everyone is impacted.”
Amid the devastation, public criticism is rising over the one-year-old government’s failure to prepare for the storm.
Local media reports have claimed some provincial administrations, already struggling to manage austerity budgets under the swingeing bailout conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund after the country’s 2022 economic collapse, were too fearful even to buy emergency supplies in advance.
Disaster warnings – when they did come – were issued in the majority language of Sinhala and also English. Not enough were translated into the country’s third official language of Tamil, despite large populations of Tamil-speaking labourers in some of the worst-affected areas in Sri Lanka’s hill country.
In Indonesia, more than 614 people have been confirmed dead and another 449 are still missing after the ferocious tropical storm smashed into Sumatra island, causing landslides and flash floods across huge swathes of country that have displaced more than 1.1 million people.
While tens of thousands of Indonesian emergency workers and military personnel have been deployed in recent days in relief and rescue operations, many remote villages remain cut off in west Sumatra and in Aceh while thousands of flood survivors on Tuesday had run out of food and clean water.
In Indonesia too, where local governments are struggling with austerity budgets imposed by Jakarta, some have admitted they do not have the capacity to deal with the scale of the calamity
As the death toll from the calamity continues to climb, Indonesian Home Affairs Minister Tito Karnavian admitted the government had been unprepared to manage the fallout.
“The disaster is quite extensive in Aceh, North Sumatra and West Sumatra,” Indonesian outlet Tempo reported Mr Tito as saying during a co-ordination meeting in the capital Jakarta.
“Similar to what happened in North Sumatra, it happened very quickly, and maybe we were not prepared for it.”
At the same meeting, Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysics Agency chief Teuku Faisal Fathani said he had warned local governments of tropical Cyclone Senyar eight days before it made landfall, and then repeated those warnings four and two days before it hit.
In Sri Lanka too, the full extent of the damage wrought by the storm fronts is still to be reckoned with some communities still cut off and unreachable in the central hill districts.
At least 200 roads have been inundated and damaged or destroyed, bridges and rail lines washed away, power lines felled and tens of thousands of homes razed across the length and breadth of the country.
Access to clean drinking water is a major problem in large parts of the country. Scarcely has a natural calamity of such a scale struck a nation less able to deal with it.
“What makes this catastrophe so painful is not only the loss of life or the destruction of property. It is the realisation that Sri Lanka’s state apparatus counted for nothing when it mattered most,” an editorial in the country’s The Morning news site thundered.
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, only a year into office after having been swept to power along with his Marxist government on a wave of public fury over the previous government’s epic economic mismanagement, has declared a national emergency and appealed for international aid. Money and emergency teams are dribbling in, from neighbouring India, Pakistan and Nepal as well as Australia, Japan and China – the infrastructure patron to which Colombo is now billions of dollars in debt.
The Sri Lankan government has also appealed to its large diaspora communities abroad to donate funds.
Initial estimates suggest it could be months before some essential infrastructure is repaired, with a damage bill well into the billions of dollars. The disaster management centre director-general said the nation was facing a “humanitarian crisis of historic proportions” with more than 1.1 million people displaced across the country.
“We have to resettle people, we have to rebuild the nation again and this is going to be a huge task,” he said.
Additional reporting: Dian Septiari
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