“There is nothing we could have done to prevent the flooding or the damage,” Eng. P. Hettiarachchi, director of Hydrology at the Department of Irrigation says of the disaster that took place between 15 and 19 May 2016. “We didn’t have enough lead time, and a similar event has not taken place in the memory of anyone in the department. Besides, people died from landslides, not floods.”
Hettiarachchi’s statement is a clear indication of the failings of the system that she must do her best to run. It also demonstrates the stand that national institutions in Sri Lanka take on their responsibility – do the minimum required to escape blame and blame someone else for the rest – and the dire need for change.
The meteorological department had warned on the evening of Saturday, 14 May 2016, that rainfall would be high in the western and north-western regions on the 15th and 16th. Rain came at the right time, but instead of falling where it was supposed to, it crashed everywhere.
Overnight, the entire Kelani catchment – the entire surface area from which rainfall naturally flows to the river – was flooded. Irrigation didn’t have enough time to respond. Hydrology is essentially the study of water, but what Hettiarachchi and her team of hydrologists at the Irrigation Department do exactly is study the relationship between rainfall levels and runoff (the storm water that flows or gets drained away from land or buildings, and when it doesn’t have a way to get to sea, causes flooding). In a situation of extreme rain, the director of Hydrology is responsible for warning the Disaster Management Center and other related parties of the possibility of flooding.
At 9pm on Sunday, 15 May 2016, in her official capacity as director of Hydrology at the Department of Irrigation, Hettiarachchi issued such a warning to the DMC that minor floods were likely to be seen in the Colombo region. She also personally called the heads of the relevant departments to inform them of the situation.
Her staff did their duty. But the standard warning that was issued contained information on water levels at seven rainfall gauging stations along the Kelani river. The layman living along its banks on illegally developed property or even a person in a legal residence has no idea whether a particular water level at a particular gauging station means his house will get flooded, and if it will, at what time and how high. It is the house owners’ imperative to acquire the necessary information from the survey department and decide for himself.
The hydrologists did their duty, by the book, but by noon on 20 May 2016, the number of people affected by the floods in Colombo was 190,341, and 147 houses in the region were either partially or fully damaged. At 9am every day, an irrigation department employee manually measures rainfall at his designated gauging station and makes a call to the head office on Jawatte Road to report. A number of such calls come to the office, where the information is fed into Mike11 computer software for river-flow prediction and flood mapping. The whole process takes 30-45 minutes, regardless of normal or emergency situations.
Eng. Badra Kamaladasa, a retired director general of the Irrigation Department and chair of the Sri Lanka Water Partnership (an independent non-profit association with a goal of promoting integrated water resources management), says daily reporting is good enough for monitoring water levels, for record-keeping and long-term planning. She will not comment on its sufficiency in preparation for the event of a flood. Mike 11 is a 1D river modeling system developed by the Dutch Hydraulics Institute, which simulates water levels and flow in inland water bodies such as irrigation canals, reservoirs and flood plains. With automatically collected data and the Real Time module that comes with the software, users are able to forecast floods on a GIS map. The manually collected data fed to Mike11 on a daily basis hardly allows it to function at optimum. The Irrigation Department has been working on automating the system for over a year now, but it wasn’t in place when it was needed.
[pullquote]“We know the water levels and the inundated area, but we do not know how long it took for the water to rise to recorded levels and how long the area was inundated for. This type of information is supposed to be recorded.”
Badra Kamaladasa[/pullquote]
In the absence of the machine, a human is called upon to serve, but when rainfall levels started rising, no one in the hydrology department understood the real-life implications of the numbers. It may have happened like this before, but nobody wrote the details down. Where scientific models were insufficient, there was not even failing human memory to warn what might ensue.
“The historical information we have is not detailed enough,” Kamaladasa reveals. “We know the water levels and the inundated area, but we do not know how long it took for the water to rise to recorded levels and how long the area was inundated for. This type of information is supposed to be recorded.”
Between the Irrigation Department, the Meteorological Department, the Land Reclamation and Development Commission, the Coast Conservation Department, the Disaster Management Commission, and a myriad other government institutions, there is no one to take responsibility for the flooding or the damage. “The Colombo flood system is now like nobody’s baby,” Kamaladasa says.
Until the late 1960s, both natural and man-made irrigation systems – the rivers and drains – were under Irrigation Department purview. In 1968, the Sri Lanka Land Reclamation and Development Corporation was set up in the midst of much controversy to “reclaim and develop marshy and low-lying areas” and “retain custody, management and control” of such. Drainage has since been a notorious problem.
The issue does not lie with one body or the other, but the fact that the purview of these various government institutions is yet to be agreed upon.
Following the floods of June 1987, which were the highest recorded since August 1947, major projects related to the improvement of irrigation, sewerage and drainage systems in and around Colombo were undertaken with JICA aid. The ex-post evaluation of this project by independent researchers pointed very clearly to the most significant failing of its implementation: “It is not clear whether the responsibility of operations and the management of the drainage developed in phase II lies with SLLRDC or the Colombo Municipal Council, and the fact that operations and the management of such drainage is not being conducted is a problem. Therefore, the sustainability of this project is low.”
While bureaucracies bicker, the river flows, and sometimes it overflows, destroying lives and livelihoods. “There should be better coordination,” Kamaladasa states the obvious. “The natural system cannot be divided between the organisations.” Both Kamaladasa and Hettiarachchi agree that concern for these serious issues is always short-lived. “We are excited now, but in two-to-three years, we will forget,” Hettiarachchi says.
She is speaking of how unauthorised dwelling has become a topic of national discussion following the May 2016 flooding and landslides.
“It’s only when disaster strikes that we move to action,” Kamaladasa adds. “When a municipal worker notices a problem and reports it to a supervisor, he should be taken seriously, and internal hierarchy as well as inter-organisational communication should be at a place where people are empowered and these small, incremental changes are seen as important. But that’s not how government service works.”