When the skies opened over Colombo on Friday evening, roads turned into rivers, commuters were stranded on Galle Road and in Borella, train services on every line were thrown into disarray, and the ground floor of the National Hospital, of all places, took in water. Within a day, the explanations had arrived. Yet the people deserve something better than a rain gauge reading offered up as an alibi.
The Colombo Municipal Council's case is simple enough. The Mayor tells us the drainage system was built for around 30 mm of rain, whereas the city received 129 mm. Therefore, we are invited to conclude, nothing could have been done. However, the story has shifted in the telling. On Friday night, the Department of Meteorology reported 129 mm "within a few hours". By Saturday, CMC officials were claiming it had fallen within a single hour. When the figure that excuses the Council grows more dramatic with every retelling, the public is entitled to see the station data and timings in full.
More importantly, the Met Department did not stop at the rainfall. Its Director General said plainly that the key factor was intense rain combined with blocked drains, and he reminded us that Colombo has endured heavier totals before, in 1992, 2005 and 2017. In other words, this was severe weather meeting a neglected system, and neglect is not an act of God.
Indeed, the officials gathered at the Presidential Secretariat admitted as much themselves. They conceded that garbage had choked drains and canals, and that unauthorised constructions within the Council's own limits were obstructing the flow of water. Neither problem appeared overnight. Every encroachment on a canal bank went up in full view of a municipal administration with the power to stop it, while every drain stuffed with polythene was left that way by a maintenance regime that plainly failed to reach it.
Consider, too, the timeline. On 13 October, Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya ordered that canals and drains across the Colombo District be cleaned within two weeks, precisely because heavier rain was expected. That deadline fell around 27 October. Ten days later, the city went under. So, either the cleaning was done and proved hopelessly inadequate, or it was not done at all. Both possibilities demand an answer. Furthermore, it is telling that routine maintenance, already the statutory duty of the CMC and the Sri Lanka Land Development Corporation, needed a Prime Ministerial order in the first place.
The Government's response, meanwhile, has followed a well-worn script. A meeting was held, a task force was announced, and short, medium and long-term plans are to be prepared. We have heard all this before. In 2010, the CMC blamed garbage, salvinia and unauthorised construction. In 2016, a Municipal Commissioner admitted the drainage system was extremely old and urgently needed renovation. A decade on, the same diagnosis is being read out as though it were a fresh discovery. A task force to respond to floods is welcome, of course, but responding to floods is not the same as preventing them.
There is also a political point that cannot be dodged. The National People's Power holds the Presidency, a two-thirds majority in Parliament and, since last year, the mayoralty of Colombo. Consequently, the familiar excuse of a capital run by one party and a country run by another no longer applies. If the drains of the capital cannot be kept clear under such alignment, the problem is not politics but performance.
None of this means the rainfall was ordinary. It was not, and a system designed for 30 mm will struggle with four times that, however clean it is. Since such downpours are becoming more frequent, the city cannot keep treating them as freak events. Accordingly, the CMC must publish, within weeks rather than months, a list of every drain and canal it maintains, when each was last cleaned and what is being spent on them. Likewise, the SLLDC must state whether the Rs 1.23 billion in machinery approved by Cabinet in September has actually been bought and deployed. The Council must also explain, ward by ward, what it intends to do about the encroachments its own officials have now identified.
Colombo does not need another meeting. It needs drains that work, and an administration willing to be held to account when they do not. Until then, every heavy shower will bring the same flood and the same excuses.