Existing maps showing safe – and risky – areas could have saved lives in October landslide, officials say
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Sri Lanka needs to make better use of hazard mapping to minimise the impact of frequent, and often devastating, extreme weather events linked to climate change, experts say.
For instance, if such maps had been properly used, lives could have been saved during a deadly landslide in Meeriyabedda village in late October, according to officials at the National Building Resources Organisation (NBRO), which develops the maps.
"We have hazard maps for the village, but nobody took notice of them or used them," said R.M.S. Bandara, head of NBRO's Landside Risk Research and Management Division.
Heavy monsoon rains caused a landslide that engulfed Meeriyabedda tea plantation, located about 220 km southeast of Colombo, destroying 66 homes and killing 37 people.
On the NBRO map, the area is clearly marked as being at high risk for landslides.
The problem, Bandara said, is that the maps are rarely used by either state or private sector planners.
"The map shows what areas are at risk, and if we are to minimise that risk decisions have to be made based on these assessments," he said. "Nothing like that happened (with Meeriyabedda)water water."
Bandara said public officials should have used the maps to clearly demarcate safe areas and evacuation routes to help keep villagers from becoming landslide victims.
"The map shows you areas with high, medium and low hazard, so planners can work easily," he said. To arm planners with even more detailed information, smaller resolution maps for Sri Lanka's ten landslide-prone districts are freely available on line.
But according to Bandara, Meeriyabedda appears to have been built with no regard to the risk. The area was heavily populated, with living quarters used by plantation employees and their families dotting the steep slopes.
Village authorities said they would have used the maps, if only they had known they existed.
"We did not know that there were such maps," said Arumugam Selvarani, who works as a health officer in the village. "We did not have a clear idea as to what areas were most dangerous."
EVACUATION ROUTES
The effective use of hazard maps remains rare in Sri Lanka. The last time the maps were used to any significant benefit was soon after the 2004 tsunami, when areas of higher elevation were identified and clearly marked along the coast as evacuation routes.
One city in the east of Sri Lanka, Batticaloa, was mapped extensively in 2012 using the OpenStreetMap platform - which allows anyone to contribute to and edit an online map of the world - as part of a larger World Bank project aimed at increasing disaster resilience.
"Maps describing the location and characteristics of population centres, critical infrastructure, and disaster risk will be key to inform planning efforts," the bank said of the mapping. But it is not clear whether public planners use the maps produced.
"Detailed use of maps is still not very widespread in disaster planning here," said Sarath Lal Kumara, a spokesman for the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), the main government body overseeing disaster resilience efforts.
NBRO's Bandara said that hazard maps should at least now be used when providing new homes to the families affected by the Meeriyabedda landslide. The government has said that it plans to spent Rs 900 million ($6.9 million) rebuilding the houses at a safer location and strengthening the structures of several schools in the area.
But according to Kumara of the DMC, finding suitable land for relocation in the area is a complex issue. "Most of the land is taken up by plantations, and the people live alongside them," he said. "So we need to look at land availability carefully."
Experts hope that increasing awareness of hazard mapping will in the future help both authorities and people assess and avoid the risks associated with extreme weather.
Selvarani, the health officer at Meeriyabedda, said that most families in the village had been living there for generations, despite the danger, and had in fact returned to their houses after two smaller landslides in 2005 and 2011.
"Lots of the houses had cracks," she said. "But no one took them seriously."
(Reporting by Amantha Perera; editing by Laurie Goering)
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