Beyond the rain: Systemic lessons from the Ditwah catastrophe

CYCLONE DITWAH TOLL CLIMBS: 474 DEAD, 366 MISSING DMC Update (10 AM, 3rd December): Adverse Weather Continues, Recovery Ongoing

- By Dilum Alagiyawanna

logical “Red Alert” into an intelligible “Evacuate Now” order for specific landslideprone zones.

This represents a startling regression in capability. A comparative analysis of historical data reveals that Sri Lanka possessed the competence to manage this exact scenario just five years ago.

™ 2020 (Cyclone Burevi): when this system approached Trincomalee, the administration evacuated 75,000 people preemptively. The result was a “Managed Disaster” with fewer than five casualties.

™ 2017 (Cyclone Ockhi): despite being an offshore system, early evacuations kept the death toll to 26.

In stark contrast, Ditwah has resulted in mass casualties not seen since the 1978 Cyclone. We moved from the “Zero Casualty” success of 2020 back to the chaos of the past, proving that the machinery of the State has rusted in the intervening years.

The fragility of critical infrastructure

For the business community, the destruction of physical infrastructure presents a bleak economic outlook. The resilience of a nation is measured by the durability of its grid and its roads, and Ditwah has shown ours to be dangerously brittle.

We witnessed a catastrophic failure of the “Water-Energy Nexus.” When the Greater Kandy Water Treatment Plant at Gatambe flooded, it was expected. What was unacceptable was that even after waters receded, the plant remained offline because the grid had collapsed, and there was no backup power to run the sludge pumps.

The collapse of a single high-voltage transmission tower connected to the Randenigala power plant severed power to Mahiyanganaya, Ampara, and Vavuniya. That a single point of failure could cause such widespread blackouts raises serious questions about the redundancy and maintenance of our high-tension network.