Two women from London have been left stranded by landslides since Cyclone Ditwah hit Sri Lanka last week and are running out of food and water, one of their daughters has said.
Melanie Watters, 54, and her friend Janine Reid, 55, from London, were travelling through the mountains in Pussellawa, when the road in front of them flooded, forcing another bus over a nearby cliff.
Melanie’s daughter, Katie Beeching, has said that they car were travelling in faced the risk of also being washed away, so their driver decided to keep them in the vehicle overnight, as conditions gradually worsened.
The two women eventually found shelter at a tea plantation, but have been running out of food, water and fuel whilst the roads in and out of Pussellawa remain impassable.
Katie, who is nine months pregnant, has made numerous panicked calls to the Foreign Office on behalf of the pair but has been informed that there is no plan to evacuate the women.
The Foreign Office has said that the UK government will not be rescuing the two women, who were on a two-week holiday when the cyclone struck.
Katie, who works for an NGO and previously for the National Crime Agency, recalls being told: “This is your job,” and: “It isn’t our responsibility.”
She told The Guardian: “There are literally two British nationals on their own, no food, water, fuel, no way in or out. This is getting worse. The weather’s going to change again in a couple of days. You know, there has to be a plan … I said: ‘This could be lives lost if you don’t take some sort of action, genuinely.’ But they just said: ‘No, there’s no plan.’”
The current death toll from Cyclone Ditwah in Sri Lanka currently stands at 465.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the president of Sri Lanka, described the cyclone as the “largest and most challenging natural disaster in our history”.
The cylone has wreaked destruction across a huge swathe of Asia, killing more than 1,400 people.
Indonesia has borne the heaviest blow, recording at least 753 deaths. At least 185 people in Thailand and three in Malaysia have also been confirmed dead.
Katie has said that she has been able to communicate sporadically with her mother and friend, who left for their holiday on 21 November and were due to return this Wednesday.
She said: “They were travelling down from Kandy to the south-east. They were originally going to take the train, but they were advised not to take the train and to drive.
“They’re not on a tour or anything, it’s just them. As they were driving down, it hit – this is where the worst of the cyclone has hit, in the mountains, in the plantation region.
“On Thursday midday, we basically got messages, which said: ‘This is really scary, there’s landslides everywhere, we’ve seen a bus go over the side of the cliff.’
“Where they were had the highest lives lost because obviously the landslides just cover people’s houses. Their driver turned around, and they were heading back to Kandy, but they got as far as a place called Pussellawa.”
Katie has expressed disappointment at the response from the Foreign Office, who she has worked closely in the past, as well as being unable to reach the UK’s high commissioner to Sri Lanka, Andrew Patrick.
“[The Sri Lankan tourist police] said the military would have been there a few days ago and that they still haven’t,” she said. “They can hear helicopters flying over, but they’re apparently retrieving bodies.”
