By Amantha Perera
ARANAYAKE, Sri Lanka, May 25 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – For the first 48 hours after a huge landslide wiped out his hometown of Aranayake and buried 220 families, Prabath Wedage was on his mobile phone constantly.
“I have not been off the phone for five minutes,” said Wedage, who has been trying to coordinate consignments of relief supplies for 1,700 displaced people in 13 emergency shelters, including Rajagiri School, where he normally works.
In this devastated community – as in many disaster-hit places – the ubiquitous mobile phone and its social media apps are becoming a vital tool for relief and rescue workers, officials and families to share and gather information and keep in touch.
As Sri Lanka is hit with more disasters, from droughts to floods to landslides, making the most of the tools will be key curbing losses, experts say.
“We could have saved more lives if we had used these properly,” Wedage told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
He noted that it was only after last week’s landslide, which followed three days of incessant rain, that many residents begun to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to share disaster-related information.
But government agencies dealing with disaster management also have been slow to adopt social media as a tool, experts say.
