Category: World
Service
Date: 14.01.2005
Printable version
A hotel manager in Sri Lanka
tells Assignment this week how he cleared a beach of hundreds
of people after his brother 聳 a journalist in Colombo - warned
him in a telephone call on the morning of 26 December that a tidal wave
had struck Sri Lanka.
"It was my brother's call that came in the morning asking me whether
we had any trouble with the sea. I told him it was a nice, perfect,
sunny day and the sea seems to be pretty calm. What seems to be the
problem? He told me there's been a tidal wave and Trinco and Matara
have been affected," Lakal Jayasinghe tells 麻豆社 World Service.
Mr Jayasinghe said he called the poolside at his hotel and spoke to
the lifeguard who told him that everything looked nice and calm at that
moment but he would take the guests in.
"Within five to 10 minutes, he rang me and said, 'I can see the
waves come up and everybody running around me, backwards towards the
land'. I definitely feel like that 10 minutes looks like 10 hours."
In Assignment, correspondent Anna Horsbrugh Porter returns to
Sri Lanka - one of the countries worst hit by the tsunami 聳 where
30,000 people are dead and another one million people are homeless.
The country has only recently emerged from two decades of civil war.
Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga is asked, if a telephone
call from one man to his brother saved hundreds of lives, couldn't Sri
Lanka have had a better internal warning system?
听
"Yes, we could have had an
early warning system, but you cannot have small early warning systems.
Apparently in the world, still, there is no early warning system for
tsunami. The warning you can have is for the earthquake. And even that
we didn聮t have," said President Kumaratunga.
The President's former communications director and an expert on disaster
warning systems, Rohan Samarajiva, said: "Was it not possible for
a report from a person in authority in Kalumnai to have been communicated
to the west coast or the south, so that some decision could have been
made about giving more people warning.
听
"Because when you hear stories of the survivors,
they had two or even one minutes warning and it made a difference. They
got away because someone just told them, run."
听
"And then what is more disturbing
is that Trincomalee, which is the main naval base, was hit at about
8.50 or 8.55am, and there the infrastructure of the navy, people I would
think have a very good communications capacity and who know what tsunamis
are, was not affected and that could have been communicated to the navy
base in Galle. It could have been communicated to Colombo, and action
could have been taken."
"We cannot say that we have a right as a government not to care
about disaster preparedness or disaster warnings because the core business
of government is protecting its people.
听
"As an ordinary citizen I cannot predict or figure
out when a tsunami is going to come and kill my children... it is irresponsible
to say that as a poor country, we cannot do that,"聰 he said.
Assignment will be broadcast on 麻豆社 World Service tomorrow (Saturday
15 January) at 1806 GMT and on Sunday (16 January) at 1506 GMT.
