Residents in the Rampadeniya area of Ginigathhena have warned that large rocks and trees could fall onto the Hatton-Colombo main road, one of the principal routes into the central hills.
Heavy rainfall in the area over recent days brought earth and rock down onto the road, disrupting traffic, Ada Derana reported.
The fallen debris was cleared afterwards. But residents say several large rocks and trees remain in a dangerous position in the reserve above the road, and could come down at any time onto a busy route used by both vehicles and pedestrians.
They have called on the authorities to remove them before a serious accident occurs.
What has not been established
Ada Derana did not report which agency is responsible for the slope — the Road Development Authority, the National Building Research Organisation and the divisional secretariat all have potential roles — or whether any of them has inspected the site since the rockfall.
Nor did it report how long the road was disrupted, whether anyone was injured, whether a landslide warning has been issued for the area, or whether the residents’ complaint has produced a response.
No other verified newsroom carried the warning at the time of writing.
Context
The A7 through Ginigathhena is a steep, cut-slope road on the Nuwara Eliya district boundary and one of the routes most exposed to slope failure in the central highlands. Complaints of this kind — debris cleared, unstable material left above — are a recurring pattern on hill-country roads, where clearing the carriageway is faster and cheaper than stabilising the slope that produced the fall.
The warning also comes as the NBRO works through a much larger relocation programme, having identified about 30,000 houses in landslide-prone areas nationally.
Rainfall in the hills has been intermittent rather than sustained. The Meteorology Department has forecast showers and strong winds in several areas, while much of the country remains under a dry spell severe enough to have damaged thousands of acres of crops — a combination in which short, intense bursts of rain fall on ground that has been baked hard, which is when slopes are most likely to shed material.
