COLOMBO – Heavy rains lashed Sri Lanka on Friday, hampering a major clean-up operation after severe flooding and landslides last week killed nearly 500 people, officials said.
Authorities reported up to 132 millimeters of rainfall in southern Sri Lanka over a 15-hour period ending Thursday night.
But while the deluge was intense, they said the large-scale flooding seen since last week had begun to subside.
The Disaster Management Center said 486 people had been confirmed killed and another 341 were still unaccounted for after Cyclone Ditwah left the island on Saturday.
The number of people in state-run refugee camps has dropped to 170,000 from a peak of 225,000 as floodwaters receded in and around the capital Colombo.
Record rainfall triggered floods and deadly landslides, with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake saying it was the most challenging natural disaster to hit the island in its history.
Residents evacuated from the landslide-prone central hills have been told not to return immediately to their homes, even if they were unaffected by the slides, as the mountainsides remained unstable.
In the central town of Gampola, residents worked to clear the mud and water damage.
“We are getting volunteers from other areas to help with this clean-up,” Muslim cleric Faleeldeen Qadiri told AFP at the Gate Jumma Mosque.
“We have calculated that it takes 10 men a whole day to clean one house,” said a volunteer, who gave his name as Rinas. “No one can do this without help.”
The top official in charge of the recovery, Prabath Chandrakeerthi, Commissioner-General of Essential Services, said authorities were paying 25,000 rupees ($83) to clean a home, with costs of reconstruction as much as $6-7 billion.
A further 2.5 million rupees ($8,300) is being paid to begin rebuilding destroyed homes. More than 50,000 houses had been damaged as of Friday morning, officials said.
Chandrakeerthi’s office said nearly three-quarters of the electricity supply across the country had been restored, but some parts of the worst-affected Central Province were still without power and telephones.
President Dissanayake declared a state of emergency on Saturday and has vowed to rebuild with international support.
Meanwhile, reporters managed to get in when the road opened briefly on Thursday, before it shut again for urgent repairs.
In picturesque Hadabima village, surrounded by mountains on one side and a river on the other, 24 people were buried in last week’s mudslides.
That is a fraction of the national toll of 481 deaths, more than half in the tea-growing central hills. Heavy rains triggered by Cyclone Ditwah had saturated the mountainsides and made them unstable.
Tailor Adish Kumaran, 41, said his sister and brother-in-law were buried when they rushed to rescue a neighbour whose home was damaged.
“They were also caught up in a second slide,” Kumaran told AFP, adding that six bodies had not yet been recovered.
“This is a cemetery now. We don’t want to live in this village anymore,” he said.
Nationwide, some 345 people remain missing, according to official figures.
The government has said about 25,000 houses have been damaged or completely destroyed and has promised state help to rebuild.
But the main agency dealing with the recovery effort says Sri Lanka will need up to $7 billion for the task, much of it from international donors.
It is a vast sum for the island of 22 million people, still reeling from an economic meltdown in 2022.
Tea factory worker Mariah Sivakumar, 39, said her immediate priority was her three school-going children.
“All their books and clothes have been lost in the floods,” she said from a relative’s home after authorities warned her own house was at risk from a landslide.
She said there was no way she and her husband — also a tea factory worker — could afford to buy new uniforms and textbooks for the children, let alone build a new house.
