People set example for politicians to follow

Some opposition political parties have striven hard to turn the disaster of Cyclone Ditwah to their advantage.

- BY JEHAN PERERA

A calamity of such unanticipated proportions ought to have enabled all political parties to come together to deal with this tragedy. Failure to do so would indicate both political and moral bankruptcy. The main issue they have forcefully brought up is the government's failure to take early action on the Meteorological Department's warnings. The Opposition even convened a meeting of their own with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe and other senior politicians who shared their experience of dealing with natural and man-made disasters of the past, and the present government's failures to match them.

The difficulty to anticipate the havoc caused by the cyclone was compounded by the neglect of the disaster management system, which includes previous governments that failed to utilise the allocated funds in an open, transparent and corruption free manner. Land designated as "Red Zones" by the National Building Research Organisation (NBRO), a government research and development institute, were built upon by people and ignored by successive governments, civil society and the media alike. NBRO was established in 1984. According to NBRO records, the decision to launch a formal "Landslide Hazard Zonation Mapping Project (LHMP)" dates from 1986. The institutional process of identifying landslide-prone slopes, classifying zones (including what we today call "Red Zones"), and producing hazard maps, started roughly 35 to 40 years ago.