posted
15 cm of rain - six inches - fell over the island, resulting in flooding island wide.
One river rose 14 feet.
Pictures on the news are showing houses with just roofs showing, an entire valley covered in flood waters. People on the tops of trees, barely strong enough to hold them, waiting for rescue helicopters to pick them up. Another picture showed a human chain trying to fight its way out of the current towards higher land.
Fahim and I don't watch the news much. The alert? A phone call from someone from church asking if we were okay. We live on the top of a hill - we're fine. Four or five families from church aren't so lucky - their houses are under water.
Oy.
If it's not one thing, it's another. It just never ends.
Update: Some places received 36 cm of rain. That's, what, 14 inches. Yowsa!
Power lines are out all over the place. Buildings and walls are collapsing, some buildings collapsing onto cars. Power lines are also collapsing.
Then there are the potholes, made ever worse by the rain. And when I say pothole, I'm really saying sinkhole. Big enough to capture buses. You know, the big kind that, in Canada, would hold 72 passengers but here are regularly used to transport double that. Yeah, that kind of bus.
And on another note, the new president is already the president. There doesn't seem to be much, if any, waiting time between the election and when the pres. starts being on the job.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Oh, I guess I forgot to mention. We live on the top of a hill. We're so completely fine. Which also adds to the whole reason we're so oblivious.
A friend of mine last year lived in a house that was halfway down a hill, and whenever it rained the monsoon rains that we get, her lowest level - the sitting room - would fill with water. Three or four inches was fairly common. The owners wouldn't fix it, or perhaps couldn't. It was never really clear. But she's now in Tunisia, so it's no never mind now. Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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Apparently, all of Colombo is under water. See, there's a problem here with garbage...
While garbage collectors are supposed to collect garbage twice a week, it doesn't always happen. They skip neighborhoods if they're lazy or feel like taking the day off.
Add to that the fact that there are a lot of stray dogs, cats, goats, cows, and water buffalo around, and the problem becomes even bigger.
Picture, if you will, people putting their garbage out for collection. Most people are too poor to even consider buying garbage cans, so when garbage is put out, it's in plastic bags. Plastic bags which aforementioned stray dogs tear into in the first five minutes after garbage is put out. Then the cats, cows, and other animals show up and take whatever the dogs have left.
The end result is garbage strewn over the road and sides of the roads.
Add to this the fact that Sri Lanka doesn't have a piped waste water system. Instead, it has open water drains along the sides of roads. No, not for sewage - while there's no sewer system, houses here have septic tanks. The open drains are for other water - kitchen, laundry, sinks, showers. And rain.
When you combine strewn garbage, packed in plastic bags, that eventually falls into the open drain system, I think you can probably guess what happens next. The drains clog.
Then monsoons come, and where does the rain go?
Not through the drainage system, that's for sure. Oh no. It stays in the streets, flooding them.
And that's what we have. Flooded streets.
Our neighborhood is fine, and we had no problem getting to the department store for grocery shopping, unlike many, many other people in this country. We do pass over one bridge on the way, and we looked at the river underneath. Well, except that it was very nearly not underneath - the river was about a foot below the level of the bridge, which is at least six feet higher than normal.
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