Adequate funds for flood victims

by Ranil Wijayapala

Sufficient funds have been already released to District Secretaries and Divisional Secretaries to look into the needs of over 150,000 people who were affected due to floods and landslides reported in many parts of the country, Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Amaraweera told the Sunday Observer .

He said that the Ministry hopes to spend nearly Rs. 200 million for those affected in the form of providing cooked meals, dry rations and compensation for those killed and repair houses which had been destroyed or damaged due to floods and landslides.

According to statistics over 4,500 houses have been either partially or fully damaged due to adverse weather conditions. The Minister said that they are now focusing mainly on measures to prevent future disasters such as landslides which may result due to the rainy weather conditions continuing.

“We hope to allocate more funds to avoid disasters in future”, he said.

The Minister said that he had visited the Kurunegala, Matale and Kandy districts to assess the situation and instructed officials to take precautionary measures to avoid possible landslides.

Meanwhile, the spokesman for the Disaster Management Centre Pradeep Kodippili said that the number of people affected by floods remained at 150,000 yesterday morning too since no major rainfall had been reported on Friday and Saturday morning. According to the situation report issued yesterday morning six deaths were reported and 164,493 people of 42,736 families were affected. The report also said that 406 houses had been fully damaged and 4,747 houses had been partially damaged due to floods and landslides.

The highest number of those affected were reported from Mannar (40,074), Jaffna (30,452) and Kilinochchi (21,564) districts.