Electrician V. K. Muthukrishnan ran to help when a lightning-fast mudslide flattened his neighbour’s home in rural Sri Lanka — only to see his own house swept away minutes later.
“I have nightmares, thinking that I sent my friend to his death,” a tearful Muthukrishnan said as he showed AFP reporters the wreckage of his modest home, destroyed on November 27.
“But it could have been more.”
AFP was among the first news outlets to enter the stricken central province of Kandy, where the main road had been cut off for over a week due to falling boulders and landslides.
Reporters managed to get in when the road opened briefly on Thursday, before it shut again for urgent repairs.
In picturesque Hadabima village, surrounded by mountains on one side and a river on the other, 24 people were buried in last week’s mudslides.
That is a fraction of the national toll of 481 deaths, more than half in the tea-growing central hills. Heavy rains triggered by Cyclone Ditwah had saturated the mountainsides and made them unstable.
AFP
