Two opposition parties blamed the government and the Colombo Municipal Council on Saturday for the flash flooding that submerged much of the capital on Friday evening, both arguing that warnings of a wetter-than-usual monsoon were ignored and that the city’s drains had been left unmaintained.
The charge is politically awkward in an unusual way: the council being blamed is run by a mayor the Opposition Leader identifies as belonging to the governing party, so both opposition parties are attacking the government at national and municipal level at once.
The UNP: an unfinished World Bank project
The United National Party issued a statement over the signature of Working Committee member Dinuk Kolambage accusing the government of failing to prepare for natural disasters, Hiru News reported.
Local and international weather agencies had warned continuously that the El Niño phenomenon would bring above-average rainfall this monsoon season, the statement said, yet the authorities were unprepared for an emergency. Colombo’s residents were put to severe difficulty, it added, and motorists in particular faced life-threatening conditions.
Update, 7 November — the statement in the original English. The Daily Mirror has since published the UNP statement directly, quoting it at length rather than in translation, and frames it around the demand that the government recommence the World Bank-assisted Colombo City Flood Mitigation Project. The English text matches the Sinhala account on every point below — the 2018 launch, the US$104 million World Bank component, the 2022 bankruptcy crisis, the El Niño warnings, the drains, and the call for the Mayor and CMC to explain themselves. It attributes the statement to Dinouk Colombage of the Working Committee; the Sinhala filing renders the name “Dinuk Kolambage”, and this desk now uses the English spelling. The statement specifies the council’s “sewage drains and canals” and says the warnings came from “both domestic and international Meteorologist Departments”.
The party’s central allegation is directed at the Colombo Municipal Council: it says a principal cause of the flooding was the council’s failure to properly maintain the drains and canals that carry water and waste around the city. Because maintaining that system is a core council responsibility, the statement said, the Mayor and the CMC should explain themselves immediately.
The UNP also reached back to its own record in office. It said the Metro Colombo Urban Development Project was launched in 2018 under a UNP government, including a US$104 million World Bank-assisted flood mitigation component, but could not be completed because of the 2022 bankruptcy crisis. It called on the government to give that project immediate priority to reduce future flood risk.
The Opposition Leader: a slogan turned against the government
Sajith Premadasa attacked the government’s second-anniversary slogan directly. Although the government is holding meetings across the country under the theme “Two Years, Good for the Country”, he said, it now has to be said: “Two Years, Good for the Country — and all of Colombo is flowing.”
He was speaking at the inauguration of a Samagi Youth Force branch in the Agalawatta seat in the Kalutara district on Saturday, Hiru News reported.
The President talks of building new reservoirs, Premadasa said, but with Friday’s rain the whole of Colombo became a reservoir. When his party’s opponents took control of the Colombo Municipal Council they promised to make the city shine within six months, he said, and Friday night exposed that the cleaning and renovation of the drainage system had not been properly carried out.
He said a “renaissance” had arrived for the President, the Prime Minister, the government’s 159 MPs and the Mayor, but not for the public, and that a single rainstorm had wrecked many people’s livelihoods. Drains should have been repaired and a flood management programme prepared, he argued, and advance warnings had been given that both drought and heavy rain could follow from El Niño and La Niña effects.
His sharpest line was a question about capacity rather than intent: with an executive presidency, a two-thirds majority in Parliament and a mayor of its own party in Colombo, if the government cannot manage water in the capital, how will it build the country?
Premadasa went on to accuse the government of bringing forward legislation that infringes fundamental, human and democratic rights, saying the real purpose of the bill presented as protecting the state from terrorism is to protect the government from the people — a line he has used before. The rest of the address was youth-wing material: the IMF programme ending by March 2027, debt repayments above US$3 billion from 2028, and a pledge that his party would let young people advance on merit rather than political connections.
The Met Department’s account supports two of the premises
The opposition claims are political, but two of their factual foundations are independently supported by the Department of Meteorology’s own briefing the same day.
Director General Ajith Wijemanne said more than 100 millimetres of rain fell over Colombo in less than an hour on Friday evening, triggering flash floods, with close to 123mm recorded in the city over the day, NewsFirst reported.
Crucially, Wijemanne also pointed to blocked or obstructed drainage systems as a contributing factor to the flooding — the same mechanism both opposition parties allege, stated by the national forecasting authority rather than by a political party.
He also confirmed that El Niño conditions are prevailing, alongside the presence of the Intertropical Convergence Zone near Sri Lanka, which is the premise the UNP statement rests its “ignored warnings” charge on. Sri Lanka is in its Second Inter-Monsoon season, he said, when convective rainfall is common: cloud builds after sunny mornings and delivers heavy showers within 30 minutes to an hour, typically after 1 p.m. Similar conditions could continue for weeks across the Western, Sabaragamuwa, North Western, Central and Southern provinces including Galle and Matara.
What the Met Department does not do is apportion blame. Wijemanne lists blocked drainage as one contributing factor alongside rainfall intensity; he does not say who was responsible for the drains, or that maintenance was neglected.
Three different rainfall figures are now in circulation
Readers comparing coverage should note that three separate measurements of this event are being quoted, and they are not revisions of one another:
| Figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ~123 mm | Colombo, Friday, Met Department | Met DG Wijemanne, via NewsFirst |
| 129 mm | Colombo, Friday evening downpour | Met Department, via Daily Mirror |
| 146.6 mm | Thimbirigasyaya, 12 hours to 6 a.m. Saturday | Disaster Management Centre, via Hiru |
The competing explanations
The dispute is not really about whether it rained hard. It is about whether the drainage should have coped.
Mayor of Colombo Vraie Cally Balthazaar has said the city’s system is designed for about 30mm of rainfall and received close to four times that, framing the flooding as an exceptional event that overwhelmed designed capacity. She convened an emergency meeting on Saturday morning with the police, Tri-Forces, Divisional Secretariats, the Governor’s Office, the Sri Lanka Land Development Corporation and the Urban Development Authority to agree immediate measures on drainage, canals and roads.
The opposition’s case is that maintenance, not design capacity, is the issue. The Met Department’s position — intense short-duration rainfall and obstructed drainage both contributed — is consistent with either reading, which is why neither side’s account can be settled from the filings available.
Sunday: Premadasa returns with a historical rainfall argument
The Opposition Leader returned to the subject on Sunday night with a sharper version of the same charge and, for the first time, figures intended to support it, Hiru News reported.
A government that came to office promising to restore Colombo within six months, he said, has not managed even to clean the city’s drains properly.
His new argument is a comparison with past rainfall. Citing meteorological records, Premadasa said Colombo received 493.7mm in 1993 and 440.2mm in 2010 — far more than the roughly 120mm he attributes to this event — without producing a disaster on this scale. His conclusion is that the volume of rain cannot be the explanation, and that the failure to develop the drains and clear waste from them is what left large numbers of people in severe difficulty.
He also put a figure to the council’s own position, saying the Mayor had stated after the flooding that Colombo’s drainage is adequate only for rainfall of 30 to 50mm. That is a wider band than the “about 30mm” the Mayor is quoted as giving elsewhere; the two statements have not been reconciled by any filing.
On remedies, Premadasa said that in office he would introduce the kind of integrated storm water drainage and advanced flood management systems used in Singapore and the Netherlands.
The register was more conciliatory than Saturday’s. This was not the moment to point fingers at one another, he said, but to make sure the situation is not repeated — before adding that a government holding a parliamentary majority ought to be able to solve the problem.
The rainfall comparison is the first attempt by either side to test the competing explanations against evidence rather than assertion. It is also incomplete: Premadasa cites annual or event totals without stating the period each covers, and the Met Department’s own account of Friday rests on intensity — more than 100mm in under an hour — rather than the daily total. A large total spread over many hours and a smaller one concentrated in forty minutes make very different demands on a drainage system, and nothing in the filing addresses that distinction.
Not reported
Premadasa’s 1993 and 2010 rainfall figures are reproduced as his claim; this desk has not verified them against Department of Meteorology records, and the filing does not say whether they are daily, event or annual totals. Neither opposition statement offers evidence for the maintenance claim beyond assertion: no inspection, audit, work order or canal survey is cited. No response from the Mayor, the Colombo Municipal Council or the government to either statement had been reported at the time of filing.
The UNP’s account of the Metro Colombo Urban Development Project — its 2018 launch, the US$104 million flood mitigation component and the 2022 halt — is reproduced here as the party’s claim; this desk has not verified the figure or the timeline against World Bank or project documentation. Premadasa’s description of the Colombo mayor as belonging to the governing party is likewise his characterisation and is attributed to him.
No casualty or displacement figures appear in either statement, and neither party names a specific drain, canal or catchment it says was neglected.
