Sitting Through a Cyclone

In late November 2025, Cyclone Ditwah hit Sri Lanka, killing at least 500 people and leaving hundreds more missing. Landslides and heavy flooding accounted for most of the deaths and damage, with places like Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, and Badulla in the inland hill country being hit hardest. Tens of thousands were displaced due to rising waters or the loss of their homes, and over a million people were directly affected by widespread flooding.

Ditwah was part of a chain of cyclones stretching from the South China Sea to the Malacca Strait to the Bay of Bengal, resulting in a week of disasters that claimed over 1800 lives in South and Southeast Asia.

As luck would have it, I was living and working in Negombo, Sri Lanka at the time with the National Fisheries Solidarity Movement (NAFSO), a local NGO that works for the rights of fishing communities. Negombo is a coastal town an hour north of the capital city Colombo, home to the country’s main international airport and a lush lagoon with a vibrant fishing industry. It also happens to be built between two west-east rivers with a canal running north-south between them - an important detail, as I found out later.

The rainfall started over the weekend of November 22nd as we were in the eastern coastal city of Batticaloa for a ceremony, beginning as a light but constant drizzle that did little to dampen the celebrations but which made the 8 hour overnight drive back to Negombo a slippery one. The rest of the week was spent half-nervously refreshing the weather reports as we heard news of floods in Batticaloa - just two days after we arrived back at the office. Comments on the Sri Lanka subreddit spoke of a low-pressure system forming off the coast, just as news stories were coming out about massive floods devastating Hat Yai in southern Thailand. Google Weather was warning of flood conditions across the country, which I thought seemed unfortunate but probably isolated. We went to work as usual on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Thursday night saw my coworker Mackenzie and I settling in for what appeared to be a heavy rainstorm, marked helpfully as "Cyclone 5" on Windy.com but with minimal warning from the government, Canadian embassy, or news media. The rain picked up overnight, pounding hard on rooftops, and I remember texting Mackenzie that the driveway had started to flood.

Friday morning saw the entire neighbourhood around our house flooded, no electricity, and unanswered texts from local colleagues. By this time the storm had been named, with warnings of heavy floods and rumours of landslides elsewhere. We couldn’t leave the house, and no tuktuks were available to take us to work regardless. And then a few texts and calls from local coworkers and neighbours: don’t leave the house, it’s not safe, stay home and rest. Point taken. We stayed home.

Power came back and cut out again intermittently through Friday night, and we came to the realization on Saturday morning that we had run out of food - but the rain had also stopped, so we could begin to take stock of the damage. Our neighbourhood in Katuwapitiya - home to St Sebastian’s Church, which was bombed in the Easter 2019 attacks - was lucky enough to have been spared most of the damage from the storm. Some trees downed, roads flooded, but most homes seemed to have made it out okay. Tying garbage bags to our feet with elastics, Mackenzie and I waded through calf-high floodwater to get to drier land, greeting our bemused neighbours as we went. Everyone seemed to be surveying the damage and beginning the process of cleaning up in the aftermath, with some yards still covered in water and others seemingly untouched thanks to elevation differences.

We made it to a nearby grocery store, one already packed with people even though it had just opened. No fresh produce available, of course, but we managed to secure some frozen sausages and veggies and bottled water. Most of the shelves were half-emptied, and we had heard that the larger supermarkets on the main road had hundreds of people queueing to get food. Clearly everyone had the same idea to stock up, even though much of the city was still flooded.

Scrolling through the Negombo public Facebook group and the FloodSupport.org site - the latter set up by a Sri Lankan tech entrepreneur to coordinate the crowdsourced emergency response across the country - I could see snippets of how bad the rest of the area was affected. Just ten minutes’ walk north of us, near the local gym I went to a few times a week, floodwaters had reached neck height, swamping buildings and cutting the neighbourhood off from food and rescue. Even further north, near the Maha Oya river, it even reached the second floor of buildings.

Half of the NAFSO team at the Negombo office were unreachable — power outages, most likely, or flooded out. Those who lived further north around the town of Chilaw, I later learned, had been completely cut off from the rest of the country as canals and reservoirs overspilled and their homes flooded. Boats were in short supply - ironic, for a fishing region, but understandable as the lagoon shores were impassable - and so the only recourse was to wait for the waters to dry out.

That night, our power went out again, caused this time by a fault somewhere in our house’s wiring. I called up a neighbour to help, and he in turn said he would call the national electricity board to fix it. At the same time, we received a drop-off of emergency food and water, courtesy of a local colleague who had access to a car that could make it through the floodwaters. Limited government capacity to respond, coupled with higher priority cases in the landslide-ravaged inland hill country, meant that the majority of the emergency response was coordinated and accomplished by volunteers wading through flooded streets and risking their lives around damaged infrastructure.

We fixed the power on Sunday morning ourselves, and by then the water nearby had dried up enough that we could get out to find a café for wifi access and to grab some extra groceries to replenish the fridge. The whole town seemed to be busy cleaning up and taking stock of the damage; the main east-west road just north of our neighbourhood was badly hit, and even as we drove along it I could see torrents of water rushing through the semi-covered drainage ditches, nearly at road level. It was a stark reminder of what we had narrowly avoided, safe in our slightly elevated house. Others clearly weren’t as lucky.

Our tuktuk driver told us that this had been the worst storm in over a decade, and that anything north of Negombo was still cut off entirely. Bridges were collapsed, power completely cut, and food was in short supply.

We made it into the office on Monday, greeting a few local colleagues who had gathered to put together a relief plan for those coworkers who were worst affected by the storm. NAFSO, like the rest of the country, had been taken by surprise by Cyclone Ditwah, and so their emergency funds very quickly ran out as they scrambled to disperse aid to the district offices around the island. We got to work putting together fundraising materials for foreign donors, documenting the damage around Sri Lanka, and taking stock of what did and didn’t work out when it came to disaster management measures.

Images from the centre of the country showed destroyed rail lines, entire villages covered in debris from landslides, and families desperate for fresh water and food supplies. Donation drives sprang up everywhere - some legit, some sketchier. I donated through PickMe, a local competitor to Uber that seemed to be legitimately partnered with on-the-ground charities. The death count kept creeping upwards as rescue teams reached affected communities.

For a country that had suffered through a multi-decade civil war, a tsunami, a massive terror attack, COVID-19, and total financial collapse, Ditwah was an unpleasant reminder that climate change and nature can easily wipe out years of progress and recovery in a single day. Sri Lanka relies heavily on tourism and trade for its economic growth, and this disaster has put a heavy damper on both. This winter’s tourist season will likely be depressed, as access to the popular sites in Kandy and Ella remain disrupted until the rail lines can be repaired, and any recent economic development will be negated by billions of dollars in damages.

I’m fortunate that I can claim to have survived a natural disaster by mostly sitting at home [in some discomfort, and often in the dark] for a weekend, but Sri Lanka as a whole will require months to rebuild and recover. We can only hope that the country builds back stronger and more resilient in the face of the ongoing climate crisis - and they’ll need the help of the rest of the world to do so.

Photo credits: Safna Saleen/NAFSO Sri Lanka