How do we ‘handle’ national disasters?
View(s):In the aftermath of Koslanda everyone is an expert. Hindsight has 20:20 vision, and we can see farther than most pundits because we stand on the shoulders of some very perspicacious giants. So every Sri Lankan within earshot is holding forth in the same tone as monotonous disaster management bureaux; the same tenor as notorious naysayers whose fault it isn’t; and the same timbre as political lumberjacks for whom no sound is made when a landslide occurs in the electoral wilderness – out of sight is out of mind…
But there’s no brushing this muddy debris under the slush carpet of coniferous pines and assorted rubble that came cascading down on the lives of sundry innocents, ushering them in to eternity without so much as a by-your-leave. The voices of voiceless dead and unburied buried beneath mounds of unforgiving earth cry out for answers, explanations, apologies, proactive planning, exigency responses, efficacious contingency measures. How the powers that be handle the trickle, then torrent, and thunderous aftermath of adverse and adversarial responses,recriminations, repercussions may well determine if and when there will be – if there ever will be again in these regions of the periphery – a landslide of the ilk that the likes of the powers that be like…
Many masks have been donned to suit the mood of the moment and see ahead to the electoral needs of the not-too-distant future. The highest powers have turned up to condole and console in person. And while we may feel we cannot condone such post-event sympathy, no politico worth his salt-of-the-earth persona would forego the photo opportunity to carve a niche in potential voters’ hearts. This is not to say that the milk of human kindness can’t run in the veins of the most cynical vote-grabbers. However, when juxtaposed with the track record of sundry central governments and successive generations of socio-culturally tinged ethnic saviours of the upcountry people, the tears of these mourners and gnashers of teeth take on a reptilian ilk. Hýpocritēs (with the accent on the second syllable) is the name that the Greeks gave the actors who wore masks to conceal their true listlessness and lack of emotion, while donning a patina of empathy.
There is also little to be commended in the attitude of big business with large-scale interests in the region. They protest (methinks they protest too loud and too long to be entirely convincing) that a. They didn’t know it could happen; and b. They couldn’t know it would happen; and c. They wouldn’t know what to do, well in time, ahead of time, if it did. Well, it did. And in the wake of warnings that have been ringing in the ears of the state, the provincial authorities, the plantation companies, and the ill-fated residents themselves, since 2005/2011, if the most farthest looking back regrets and lamentations goes… if it can be taken at face value?
There is also the speculation of armchair experts that the landslide in the general region of Badulla-Haldummulla was in the air ever since the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Don’t read this column for the technical details, dears, but if the geologists or seismologists who are now coming into the limelight with their horse-has-bolted but asses-still-neigh theories, any idiot with a PhD in an arcane branch of some recondite field of an esoteric earth science could have saved the day – if they had thought of it in time… Evidently, most well-meaning political and business-minded or scientific messiahs have not considered the adage that it’s not what you know that counts; but rather, what you remember – and communicate – on time… To make a difference in the lives of dozens, no scores, nay multiple hundreds, that counts.
The bottom line, as we draw it, is this. A decade after the island’s worst natural disaster, we’re no more ready now than we were then. Tsunamis and landslides alike catch us tragically unawares, and our genius shines forth only in the after-babble. More to the point, perhaps, in our brilliance we seem to be opening ourselves and our people endlessly – and putatively for generations to come – with a distinct failure to heed the warning signs and signals. Why else would we play with fire and tether a rival power’s nuclear submarines under our nearest neighbours’ noses and insist that no one minds the military-diplomatic ruckus it will raise? Why else would we continue to indulge the boorish prodigy of even more boar-like scions when they raise Cain in the umpteenth nightclub brawl since the peace was established island-wide and in our own well-policed backyards?
If it is any consolation, it’s not our island’s lacuna alone that encompasses such folly. As the desert crash of Sir Richard Branson’s brainchild space-plane Virgin Galactic goes to show, even brilliant hard-headed business enterprises can fail to heed sterling warnings on time. And if the powers that be don’t hear the voters’ clarion call this time, and big business can’t fathom why civil society might hold it more culpable for unnecessary deaths than it would dream of admitting, the dead of Koslanda would have died in vain.