Natural Disasters

One’s thoughts, deep concern and sorrow; the media and peoples’conversation has been the late November cyclone.

- NAN

To quote Internet Tuesday 2 December: “Latest assessments continue to reveal the extensive scale of Cyclone Dilwah’s impact, with widespread flooding and landslides deepening humanitarian needs across the county. Updated government figures report 366 deaths and 367 missing, with 1,151,776 (316,366 families) affected across all 25 districts.” We question whether the tsunami or this cylcone caused more disastrous damage. I opine that the cyclone caused much more damage, even though less lost lives than on 2004.

Personally our area in Colombo had electricity and water with no interruption. Kandy, later told by relatives, suffered a continuous blackout and inability to charge cell phones - being the least of difficulties suffered by people in town, suburbs and proximate hamlets. A man Friday who is such a help kept vigil on the bank of the Kelani Ganga as a spot in the bund restraining the water was in danger of breaching. Slight fissures occurred but no dreaded flood. When I phoned him before he joined the men of the area and the police, his reply was the usual Sri Lanka response of ‘karume’. and ‘what to do’. Jaffna campus was closed for a week because of floods in that usually parched Northern Peninsula.

I found these statistics retrieved by googling. “The Yangtze-Huai or China River Floods 1931 — 3.7 million dead —was the world’s deadliest natural disaster in the 20" century. Other disasters are graded thus: tsunami 42%, earthquake 35%, hurricane 33%, wildfires 30%, heatwave or drought 6%, blizzard 4%, mudslide 4%.