Sunday Times 2
The system Sri Lanka needs to prevent future disasters
View(s):By Dr Muhammadhn Khalid
Cyclone Ditwah struck Sri Lanka with a scale of destruction that overwhelmed the country. The rainfall was extraordinary, but the tragedy was not purely the work of nature.
What unfolded was the result of long-standing weaknesses in how Sri Lanka plans for, manages, and responds to floods and related hazards. Now that emergency response, rescue, and relief operations have largely concluded, this is the moment to ask a difficult but necessary question: how do we prevent a natural extreme like this from becoming a disaster again?
To understand what must change, it is important to briefly understand what went wrong.
The Ditwah disaster can become the moment we learned, adapted, and acted
Why Ditwah became so destructive
Neither the public nor the authorities had a clear understanding of which lands were hazardous or under what conditions those hazards would become life-threatening. Although limited flood and landslide mapping exists, including work by the Irrigation Department and the Disaster Management Centre, they are not well understood or applied. As a result, people were living — and critical infrastructure such as roads, railways, electricity lines, and communication towers had been built — in flood- and landslide-prone areas.
Over time, natural waterways, wetlands, flood basins, and marshy lands were encroached upon and filled. When the cyclone arrived, water simply reclaimed the space it had always occupied during major floods.
Unplanned urbanisation further intensified the impacts. As permeable land was replaced by concrete and asphalt, rainfall that once soaked into the ground rapidly turned into surface runoff, increasing flood peaks and overwhelming rivers and drainage systems.
Weather forecasts were delayed or inaccurate, and flood forecasts were unavailable. Emergency actions, including warnings, evacuations, road closures, and dam releases, depend on timely and reliable forecasting.
People received little or no warning, and as floodwaters rose, they did not know where to take refuge or which routes were safe to evacuate. During later flooding along the Kelani River, evacuation orders were ignored by many residents, highlighting limited public awareness of flood risk and how to respond safely.
Disaster and water management responsibilities are spread across multiple institutions responsible for forecasting, dam operations, and emergency response.
Cyclone Ditwah also revealed what can happen when dam operators are forced to make rapid decisions under extreme conditions, with limited information and without clearly defined, nationally enforced operating plans and safety assessments.
What should Sri Lanka do now?
Sri Lanka needs a holistic system grounded in science, law, and accountability. Proven systems already exist in flood- and landslide-prone countries around the world. These are global best practices that can be adapted to local conditions. Below is a brief description of such a system.
The most important and fundamental element is a strong law that holds the system described below in place and ensures accountability.
This law should mandate the appointment of agencies to develop relevant policies, guidelines, and technical services related to land use, flooding, slope stability, and emergency management, and to act as the responsible authorities. Guidelines should cover flood estimation, mass-movement protection, and development in flood- and landslide-prone areas.
Flood and landslide risks should be systematically studied and mapped by these agencies. These studies must produce clear, accessible hazard maps that show where flooding and landslides are likely to occur and under what conditions.
These studies and maps must directly guide land-use planning. Planning controls, including zoning and overlays, must restrict or condition new development in high-risk areas, especially where flood probability exceeds the one-in-100-year standard. Development approvals should clearly reflect flood and landslide risk.
Where people already live in high-risk areas, mitigation measures such as levees, detention basins, channel works, slope drainage, structural stabilisation, and warning systems should be implemented wherever possible. Where risk cannot be reduced to safe levels, relocation options, including land swaps and buy-back schemes, must be explored responsibly.
At the same time, Sri Lanka should establish its national committee for the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) and develop consistent dam safety and operational guidelines and policies, including dam release procedures. These guidelines should mandate studies to identify, map, and communicate the risks, affected areas, and populations that may be impacted by dam failure or controlled releases.
These guidelines and policies must also mandate public education. Communities must understand flood and landslide risks, know how warnings work, and trust that evacuation orders are based on sound evidence.
All of these actions must be undertaken with climate change firmly in mind, accounting for future climate conditions, not just historical experience.
Emergency services also require fundamental strengthening. A centralised emergency service should be established to work in coordination with all the relevant agencies. Studies and mappings produced by all the agencies should be used to preplan emergency actions, evacuations, safe refuge locations, access routes, and public awareness programmes.
During severe weather forecasts, this system should trigger emergency services to activate their control centres. These centres should bring together flood analysts, meteorologists, landslide experts, police and emergency managers, monitoring and translating forecasts and real-time rainfall and flood developments into timely decisions, including warnings, evacuations, road closures, and rescues.
Such actions must be based on clear, accurate, and timely forecasts of not only weather but also flooding, requiring the metrology department to be adequately equipped and capable of delivering this information.
A choice that cannot be postponed
Artificial intelligence (AI), numerical models (NM), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have an important role to play in hazard studies, planning, and forecasting. But technology on its own cannot compensate for weak systems. Without a strong legal framework that ensures these tools are applied in practice and that roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and enforced, the benefits of hazard studies, AI, NM, GIS maps, and planning will remain limited.
This is why the focus should not be on assigning blame to dam owners, emergency services, or governments after this disaster. The real task is to recognise that Sri Lanka still lacks an integrated, legally and scientifically grounded system for managing flood and landslide risk and to begin the work of building one. Doing so will take time and sustained investment, but failing to act will mean that future storms once again turn into national tragedies.
If Sri Lanka acts now, decisively and systematically, Cyclone Ditwah can become the moment we learned, adapted, and acted.
(The writer is a Melbourne-based civil engineer and hydrologist specialised in floodplain management and dam safety, with experience applying Australian best practices to flood-prone regions.)