Floods, garbage and local authorities

by Tharuka Dissanaike

Last week's flash flood brought with it an unforeseen problem. For days, sometimes even a week after the flood, piles of garbage were left rotting by the roadsides, adding to the already unpleasant situation in urban areas which suffered most from the heavy downpour.

The situation was extremely bad in certain residential quarters in the city and suburbs. People, now used to throwing their collected garbage on the road, then forgetting about it, were faced with the issue of uncollected thrash at their doorstep.

Meanwhile local authorities looked hapless. Their problem was the rain and flood. Because of the inundation of wetlands and low-lying areas, local authorities- urban councils, Pradeshiya Sabhas and such lost their conventional 'dumping grounds'. In other areas large municipality trucks could not reach the dump sites due to excessive road damage and flooded roads. So the flood crisis was followed by a garbage crisis.

It is difficult to avoid seeing the inter-relations. local authorities are primarily responsible to maintain drainage and ensure a healthy environment in their jurisdiction. This means that they need to make sure that drainage is maintained, that hap hazard development is avoided and that garbage is collected and disposed of in a manner that is not injurious to the environment or the people.

But local authorities by and large are guilty of not doing any of these functions well. In fact, by performing one-i.e garbage disposal- they compromise on the other function- hampering drainage by clogging the marshes. It could well be said that both problems faced by the people during the last week- flood and garbage- are a direct result of local authority inaction and a lack of long-term planning, or for that any kind of sustainable planning.

Even as the flood waters subsided, I noticed a fleet of earth trucks moving down the Airport Road, carrying freshly mined gravel to a fill site on some marsh in the interior of Wattala. If lessons on drainage had to be learnt the hard way, one would have expected that the October floods to have taught us.

But not so. Land filling continues with impunity and local authorities have no plan- long or short term- to control and regulate this practice that has gone on for a long, long time.

By encroaching upon what was once an extensive marsh, we are naturally compromising the environment's ability to deal with storm water, the natural way. By allowing and permitting such land filling- extensive tracts of many acres in some places- local authorities are being negligent about maintaining proper drainage.

Above all this, local authorities themselves contribute to land filling and additional pollution by dumping solid waste in the marshes. They will tell you quite plaintively that there is no other place for them to dump and that they have no option. But this excuse cannot be tolerated by the rate-paying public.

A flood that comes every 100 years or every 50 years, cannot be avoided. If one is unlucky enough to get caught in such weather, no amount of planning can save people and property. But do we have to suffer flood every time a heavy downpour happens? Do we have to wade through flooded roads when it rains hard for 20 minutes? Do we need to suffer dirty drainage water in our gardens and homes, because the local authority has permitted some 'big shot' industrialist to convert the marsh in to factory?