All four people swept away while bathing in the Maha Oya in the Peragahamankada area of Badalgama on Saturday afternoon have died, Hiru News reported. Police say all four bodies have been recovered and the search has ended.

The dead are three young women and a young man, all reported to be around 25 years old.

Three of the four drowned trying to save the first

A group of five had gone to the river to bathe. One young man did not enter the water — the only member of the party to survive.

One of the young women was then caught in a strong current while swimming. The young man and the other two young women were swept away attempting to rescue her, according to police.

That sequence — one person in difficulty, followed by those who go in after them — is the pattern behind a large share of river drownings, and it accounts for three of the four deaths here.

Where the four were from — accounts differ

Hiru’s final filing describes the four as residents of Badulla and Haputale who were employed at a local farm in Badalgama. NewsFirst’s earlier report, filed at 5:13 p.m., stated instead that “all four individuals are residents of Hatton.”

The two accounts cannot both be right on the home district — Hatton is in Nuwara Eliya District, Badulla and Haputale in Badulla District, though all three are hill-country plantation towns. This article previously carried the Hatton account, and inferred from it that the four were visitors unfamiliar with the river, roughly 130 km from home. Hiru’s later and more specific account — naming their employment at a farm in Badalgama — undercuts that inference: if they worked locally, they were not day visitors. The discrepancy is unresolved, and neither outlet acknowledges the other’s version.

River conditions not addressed

Hiru attributes the incident to a strong current. No outlet reports whether recent rainfall upstream had raised the flow, or whether the location carries warning signage or any bathing restriction. The Irrigation Department said on September 16 that there was no flood risk on the island’s rivers, and no outlet connects the drownings to weather conditions — though forecasters had said rainfall would increase across the south-west from the previous day.

It is the second drowning reported in Sri Lanka on Saturday: NewsFirst also reported a 15-year-old boy missing after drowning at the Ilwatta Anicut in Weligama.

What changed

This article has been updated three times as the toll rose. It first reported, from Hiru’s initial filing, that four people were missing. NewsFirst and a Hiru follow-up then established two deaths and two still missing. Hiru’s final filing confirms all four died and all four bodies have been recovered.

Those filings close most of the questions first flagged here: the four were one group, they entered the water in the afternoon, one member of the party stayed on the bank, and the search has concluded. The home-district question, however, has been reopened rather than settled.

Not reported

No names have been released for any of the four, and all are described only as “around 25.” The exact time of the incident is not given, nor the point at which police were alerted or by whom.

No outlet reports whether the Navy, Air Force or disaster management units joined the recovery, what the river conditions were at the time, or whether the surviving member of the party raised the alarm. Neither Hiru nor NewsFirst explains the conflict over where the four lived, and the farm employing them is not named.

Sources