Nawaz Nashra remembers grabbing his three-year-old daughter, wrapping her in a sheet and running out of their home in central Sri Lanka when a landslide hit, triggered by a deadly cyclone that killed 410 people in the worst floods in a decade.
Nashra and her pregnant sister, who lived with her, spent the next 20 minutes walking down the hillside from Alawathugoda village on Friday night, sometimes in knee-deep mud, until they reached a lower-altitude mosque, where they spent the night.
“It was completely dark… We could only hear a sound like thunder,” he said. Reuters. “The house next to ours collapsed while we were watching. There was no time to warn anyone.” About 10 houses in the neighborhood were swept away by Cyclone Ditwah and at least 25 people are feared dead, residents said Tuesday as they returned with long sticks to dig in the mud and search for bodies.
Deadly storms have hit South and Southeast Asia in recent days, devastating much of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand and claiming hundreds of lives.
In Sri Lanka, the Kandy region, where Alawathugoda is located, has recorded 88 deaths – the highest number in the South Asian country – and 150 people are still missing. More than 20,000 people have been transferred to 176 shelters set up to house them.
Across the country, 336 people remain missing and 1.2 million have been affected, authorities said, as hundreds of army and police personnel combed landslide-affected regions to recover bodies.
On Tuesday, authorities used excavators and backhoes to clear roads, removing mud and trees to create a path for food and fuel to reach affected areas.
Work was also underway to restore communication links and electricity, which was cut after strong winds snapped transmission lines, officials said.
About 3 kilometers (2 miles) from Nashra’s home, another neighborhood in the village also showed signs of having been hit by landslides, with houses partially damaged and a tangle of phones, books, furniture and clothing visible in the slush.
“They tell us to leave, but where do we go? There is a temple nearby but there is only one toilet for about 100 people. The facilities are not enough,” said Manjula Jayalath, 43, a resident of the area.
