BBC:
After floods devastated their village, Indrani Ravichandran and her family are back in their house, living in the only section that is still standing.
They are among the many victims of Cyclone Ditwah that ravaged the country last November.
The scale of the storm – and the destruction it wreaked – was unprecedented.
Over just three days, parts of Sri Lanka’s central uplands saw up to 500mm of rain – roughly the average of two months – causing catastrophic floods and landslides that swept away homes, businesses and entire settlements.
The human cost was devastating – 643 people were killed and another 173 went missing.
Indrani describes how she and her family ran for their lives in the dark as raging flood waters swept away parts of her home in Kudugalhena village in Kandy district.
“The water level rose swiftly. We rushed out and hardly had any time to pick up anything from the house.
“It was pitch dark and the rain was lashing down, the slopes were slippery and we were also terrified of treading on any poisonous animals as we ran. But we were lucky to survive.”
“It was the first time in 30 years we witnessed such ferocious floods,” Indrani’s husband Ravichandran added.
The floods are reported to have caused more destruction in Sri Lanka than the 2004 tsunami, one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.
“Compared to the 2004 tsunami, the loss of human lives was not that much. But in terms of damage to infrastructure, Ditwah caused even more harm than the tsunami,” Dr Ganeshan Wignaraja, a visiting senior fellow at ODI Global Institute in London, told the BBC.
