Happy to report that my household survived Cyclone Ditwah. Not totally unscathed, but OK.
Cyclones are not unusual in the Bay of Bengal, but usually Sri Lanka is only whipped by the tail end. This time, we were hit by the full force of the storm.
More than 800,000 people have been affected with 159 reported dead and countless still missing. Flooding and landslides were devastating. No power, no mobile phone service, no internet, no water for 24 hours. My power was restored after 24 hours with phone and internet returning about 2 hours after that. Water will have to wait for another 3 to 5 days. Thankfully, I have a 1000 litre water tank.
The Mahaweli River, the largest river in Sri Lanka, runs right through Kandy. It is heavily damed so usually it is not a problem. However, there was so much rain that despite opening up the Pologolla Dam in Kandy, the river still flooded. Therefore, the water supply has been contaminated with sand (Mahaweli stands for maha, big and weli, sand) and mud. Without power, the water purification machines could not be operated. So now that the power is back it will take up to 5 days to clean the water sufficiently.
My friend Simon has a rain gauge and has been recording rainfall for 14 years every day. He recorded 270 mm in a 24 hour period. An official recording near the centre of the island showed 580+ mm in a 24 hour period. You can imagine the destruction.
I was worried because my new place is built into a hillside. They dug out the hill to make room for the house thus leaving a 30 foot shear wall at the back.
I kept watching the wall with much trepidation. Some bits did fall off including quite a large rock that landed on the outside kitchen roof, but overall if held. Thank God. My landlords have agreed to have a soil analysis done and to get engineers in to advise on what to do to secure the wall. It will cost them a small fortune to do, but if they don't their brand new house could be destroyed. It should have been done before the house was built, but as usual they were given a building permit without requiring a retaining wall to be built.
On the first night of the storm, I was on my own in the house. Renuka had taken an extra leave day to attend a wedding out of Kandy someplace and Rizvi was who knows where. The second night, Rizvi, who it turns out was in Colombo, made it back and came to spend the night. That gave me some sense of security. Renuka didn't make it back to Kandy until about noon and then couldn't get transport to come to my place.
Renuka finally made it on the third morning only to have another huge blow out fight with Rizvi. For the second time, she said she wanted him to leave, which I asked him to do and he complied. So Renuka and I were alone on the third night without power, telephone, internet or municipal water. About 2030 there was a big crash. Some of the jewelry boxes on my dresser had been knocked to the floor. One of them broke. We had just managed to clean that up when after 10 minutes there was another crash. This time it was one of my shoe racks that was strewn half way down the stairs. Cleaned that mess up and again after 15 minutes, another crash. This time it was my clothes rack with all my dresses that was pushed over. Another clean up. Another 10 minutes and the Portmeirion coffee pot on the ledge in the dining room came crashing to the floor. 10 more minutes and the painting at the top of the second staircase came crashing down. Another 5 minutes and my large floor mirror came crashing down leaving pieces of glass all over the place.
In between each incident we kept searching for what was causing all the mayhem with torches that were failing from overuse. We never did find what was causing it. I thought at first that it was a cat, but Chewy remained calm throughout. She would have been agitated it she had smelled another cat.
After the mirror which we couldn't clean up in the dark, there were no further incidents. We swept the mirror bits into a heap and covered them with a sheet until the morning. It was hard to go to sleep though, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
My landlady came over in the morning to check on us. When we told her what had happened, she put it down to ghosts, the evil eye, bad juju, whatever. She wants to do a cleansing ceremony to get rid of the evil spirits. She claims that it is not unusual to have problems of this nature after 3 months in a brand new house. Rubbish as far as I am concerned, but if she wants to cleanse, I'll let her at it.
After much consideration, I think it might have been a frog. Maybe an Uperodon taprobanicus (Sri Lankan bullfrog). They can grow up to 75 mm in size. It had to be something big to do all the damage. A frog would also have been impossible to spot in the dark with dim torches.
Today we have brilliant sunshine. Except for the lack of water and the broken mirror, you wouldn't know anything had happened.
On the Renuka/Rizvi soap opera, she came crying into my room yesterday saying that her heart was breaking since Rizvi had left. She had twisted her ankle running around in the dark the night of the spirit visitation and was feeling particularly fragile. I finally got in touch with Rizvi and told him she wanted him back. He too had been heartbroken. It's like dealing with lovesick teenagers.
Turns out that Rizvi's house had suffered a big landslide and half of house is unsafe. The family was huddling in one room. I told him to bring them here where it is safe, but he has not done so so far.
My landlady has been wonderful, checking on us, sending food, letting me use her landline until the telephone wires to her house also came down. Truthfully, the landline wasn't of much use as Sri Lanka is one of those countries where the mobile phone technology leapfrogged over conventional telephones. The standard phone infrastructure was so poor that mobiles just took over. Everyone here has a mobile phone with fewer and fewer landlines remaining.
So another disaster behind me.
No comments:
Post a Comment