In the Wake of 9.0 by Rory Spowers
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We had moved into our house one week before. After six months in houses within the ramparts of Galle Fort, the renovation of a house we had just rented for ten years were nearly complete. For the first time in seven years, my wife and I had all our belongings in one place. A container had just arrived from the UK and the hallway was stacked with piles of cardboard boxes, ready to be unpacked as we finally installed our family into our ‘dream home’.
To begin with, being four kilometres inland and perched on a small hill, we had no idea that anything had happened. A text message came in from a friend, asking if we were ‘OK’ and saying that she and some others were ‘safe and high at Wijaya beach’, where all of us, and virtually everyone we know in the area, had been celebrating Christmas Day only hours before. Initially, we understood this to mean that Christmas celebrations had extended through the night and the party was still going.
Then the reality started to strike home. First the power went down. Then the sirens started, followed by the helicopters, turning into a steady stream of traffic for the next few days, since we are located just two hundred metres from Karapitiya, the main hospital for the south of the island. The landlines and mobile phone network were down for hours and intermittent for days. Without TV, or internet access, we turned to the car radio. Builders gathered round and translated as news came in of rising sea levels around the island, from Trincomalee in the north-east to Batticaloa, Pottuvil and Arugam Bay on the east coast, then Hambantota, Tangalle and Galle in the south, followed by Hikkaduwa, Bentota and Kalutara on the west. Knowing that we had virtually no petrol in the car, I set out with my three year old son to fill up at the nearest pumps, just quarter of a mile away.
By the time we hit the junction by the hospital, it was clear that something huge had occurred. The road was in chaos and an impenetrable queue had already developed around the petrol station. I turned round and went back to the house, the sound of helicopters above the palm trees already creating the air of a war zone and the opening scenes from Apocalypse Now. For the following three days, the pandemonium which had struck the whole coastal zone was enveloped in an eerie stillness, as a hot humid blanket stifled the stagnant air.
For all of us touched by this tragedy, the ironies continue to mount. After twenty years of civil war, Sri Lanka seemed poised on the edge of a new era. Tourism in the south of the island was booming, with more bookings than ever and the mood buoyant amongst all those associated with the industry. Apart from the habitual rumblings from a small but vocal minority within the politically volatile south, people were looking forward to a time of peace and prosperity hitherto unknown on this island.
For me personally, the ironies are stark. Part of what had propelled me to bring my family to Sri Lanka was the belief that the island offered some of the greatest security against what I perceived as the most daunting global threats of our time. After ten years of working as a writer and researcher in the environmental arena, the greatest concerns I had for my sons’ future were issues like global warming and biodiversity loss. With the greatest degree of biodiversity of any country of its’ size in the world, I saw Sri Lanka’s natural immune system as relatively intact. My last book, Rising Tides, was a history of ecological thought and singled out sea level rises as the greatest threat facing the globe over the next twenty years. Bizarrely, I had given a copy of the book to a friend the night before, who was swept from his bed in a beachfront cabana only hours later by the tsunami.
While looking at land and houses in the south of the island, my primary consideration was always to look at how this property would be affected by a sea level rise of say two or three metres over the coming decades. Of course, I never expected such a phenomenon to occur over night and, to begin with, I knew of no correlation between the tsunami and global warming. However, although it has hardly been reported in the mainstream media, there is now some evidence that rapidly melting ice in Antarctica has affected the pressure on the tectonic plate system.
This theory is supported by the fact that a much smaller quake was observed on 24th December between Tasmania and Macquarie Island, on the opposite side of the plate from the epicentre of the Big One. So, although it may be right to say that geological upheavals of this kind have happened throughout history, there is the possibility that the geo-physical changes we are seeing now can be attributed to anthropogenic, or man-made emissions, destabilising the climate and the very foundations of the globe. In terms of a root cause, the massive increases in greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution could be providing the catalyst for chain reactions, or ‘positive feedback loops’, which feed on themselves and thereby accelerate the disruption of the global climate and now, possibly even the system of tectonic plates which formed the world map as we know it.
Day by day, even hour by hour, the true impact of the devastation struck home. Everyone was physically exhausted by the sheer trauma of it all and most of us are still recovering from a state of shock. Many of those working for us, and many of the builders working on the house, have lost family members - even whole families. Horrific stories continue to mount and, in the immediate days following the event, most of us were exposed to scenes which we could never have contemplated being confronted with, from bloated bodies floating in inland canals to small babies washed up in quagmires of mud, rubble, sand and palm fronds. Many we know had dramatic escapes, from being swept out to sea and deposited in the tops of palm trees, to being stranded on the top of water towers clinging to their small children. It seems a minor miracle that many we know survived at all, since some were asleep in makeshift cabanas right on the beach.
Soon the stench became pervasive and we watched in horror as convoys of trucks brought piles of bodies to the hospital and left them lying on the ground awaiting identification. By lunchtime on Tuesday 28th, with over five hundred corpses still decomposing outside the hospital, the government gave the orders for them to be buried in mass graves before the risk of disease became too high. At the same time, we realised we could no longer keep two small children in the vicinity of the hospital and were saved by someone driving down from Colombo with the fuel we needed to get out.
Now, ten days after the event, and having had to consider every possible immediate, medium and long-term possibility, from leaving the country altogether to sitting tight in Colombo, we have returned home to Galle. An inspirational relief effort is already underway, involving many members of the ex-patriate community, and many are committed to doing whatever possible to be of assistance, both in the immediate and longer term. This is their home now and the thought of uprooting and, once again, starting a new life somewhere else, outweighs the immediate dangers of staying. For all of us though, especially those with young children, the risk of disease epidemics weighs heavily, and could at any moment call for immediate and evasive action.
Three local initiatives run by friends of ours will now be the focus of our energy. Jack Eden and Robert Drummond started a charitable association here three years ago, Friends of the South, and are already raising substantial sums in the UK and elsewhere for medium and long-term community and grass-roots project. Project Galle 2005 is a more immediate effort started by a young and energetic group, co-ordinating the distribution of aid to about 20 camps in the Galle area. Lanka Real Aid has developed as an extension of Lanka Real Estate, a local property company run by Giles Scott and Viren Perera who started the Ulpotha Sanctuary, an exclusive yoga retreat in a traditional village within the centre of the island, where they have rehabilitated ancient irrigation networks, initiated reforestation schemes and developed sustainable agriculture systems. With their charitable arm, the East Pole Foundation, their energy will be directed primarily to the east coast and some of the worst affected areas. (Details for making specific donations to any of the projects are listed at the end of this article.)
The Web of Hope (www.thewebofhope.com), a UK registered charity and on-line database of role models for positive change which I founded three years ago, is also launching a UK appeal to direct funds to all three of these projects. The Web of Hope highlights any initiative, project, mechanism or technology which is a proven success, from a grass-roots community level through to corporate and global governance, offering them as inspiration for others struggling with similar challenges.
For example, in Sri Lanka, we already list the simple rainwater harvesting technologies introduced to the dry zone by the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG) and which could be so effective in the wake of this tragedy; the grass-roots rural development model so successfully run by Dr Ariyatne and the Sarvodaya movement over the last forty years and some of the micro-credit schemes which could help revitalise the local economy. The most pressing and immediate work however is the desalinisation of wells, the constant monitoring of sanitation in the camps and ensuring that latrines do not contaminate water sources. Clean and safe distribution centres for food will need to be established, along with easy access to medical supplies and expertise.
In the longer term, we are devoting much of our time and energy to developing the Web of Hope’s eco-village and learning centre about twenty kilometres inland, where we are rehabilitating a 60 acres tea estate, planting organic paddy fields and starting some agro-forestry schemes to intercrop a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs. Although I hate to sound alarmist, we have to make provision for the fact that this may not be an isolated incident, but merely sets the precedent for what might be in store for us, not only here in Sri Lanka but in other parts of the globe as well, as we move deeper into what many see as the defining decade of human history. On a more positive note, there is a widespread belief that the enormity of this tragedy could overcome the inherent jealousies and divisions within Sri Lankan society, bonding previously conflicting groups and ultimately moving the country to a new level of unity. Let’s hope so.
Rory Spowers is the author of Rising Tides - the history and future of the environmental movement, published by Canongate, and Founder/Editor of The Web of Hope, the world’s first on-line resource of best practice role models for sustainability - www.thewebofhope.com
To make on-line donations to all three of these projects from the UK, and collect the Gift Aid, please go to www.thewebofhope.com
For more information on Ulpotha, the East Pole Foundation and Lanka Real Aid: www.ulpotha.com and www.lankarealestate.com