A fit-for-purpose Disaster Management Act

THE President's statement that the current Disaster Management Act is flawed may have been a feint to divert attention away from his acts of omission on disaster risk reduction as the Minister responsible.

- By Prof. Rohan Samarajiva

But he was not factually incorrect. Aside from all else that must be done, it is important that the discussion on developing a new law starts now.The present law's imperfections were caused by the inordinate rush of its enactment in 2005 intended to get external parties to fund all of Sri Lanka's disaster risk reduction/management (DRR/DRM) activities in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami and the serendipitiously timed World Conference on Disaster Reduction that was held within a month of that disaster in January 2005, in Hyogo, Japan. No one was allowed to see the draft and give comments. It was labelled an urgent bill, which precluded even the limited opportunity before the Supreme Court.

Taking on too much

Before the Tsunami, disaster relief was handled by Government Agents. A deadly cyclone hit the East Coast in 1978 (estimates of over 900 deaths, storm surge going as far as 1.5 km from the shore, and 250,000 buildings damaged). The Batticaloa GA, Mr. Anthonymuttu, led a heroic effort to move people away from harm's way based on the available satellite-based hazard information that came through the Department of Meteorology and the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, then the sole electronic medium in the country. In 1999, the Telecom Regulatory Commission worked with the telecom operators to make their networks resilient in the face of disasters. Payments to affected people were handled through a unit under the Ministry of Social Services.