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Massive landslides triggered by torrential rains crashed down onto three villages in the central hills of Sri Lanka, and more than 200 families were missing yesterday and feared buried under the mud and debris.
A Sri Lankan Red Cross official who attended a disaster meeting at the Aranayaka landslide site in Kegalle district said it was feared the death toll could be much higher than the official figure of 35 listed so far.
Villagers recalled hearing and seeing the torrents of muddy water, tree branches, and debris crashing down around their homes late on Tuesday.
“I heard a huge sound like a plane crashing into the Earth,” AG Kamala, 52, who had just returned to her house in Siripura village when the landslides hit the area, about 100km northeast of the capital, Colombo.
“I opened my door. I couldn’t believe my eyes, as I saw something like a huge fireball rolling down the mountain and again a huge sound,” she told the AP news agency.
Some 220 families were reported missing, the Sri Lankan Red Cross said in a statement. Officials could not give the village populations, but such villages typically include about 1,000-1,500 residents.
“At that meeting, it was revealed that around 300-400 people are feared to have died in the Aranayaka landslide,” Neville Nanayakkara, director general of the Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, told Reuters news agency.
As anxious family members waited for news about missing loved ones, officials said the full extent of the tragedy was still unclear.
One woman, AG Alice, said all nine of her children were unaccounted for. “I don’t know what happened to me after” the landslides hit with “a thundering sound I’ve never heard in my life”, she said.
More than 1,000 people who escaped the disaster were sheltering and being treated for minor injuries at a nearby school and a Buddhist temple, according to government official Mahendra Jagath. — Al Jazeera
derick.khumalo