Opposition MP S. M. Marikkar has said the Mayor of Colombo should resign or be removed from office by the President over the city’s flooding, arguing that the Colombo Municipal Council failed to clean the capital’s drains despite advance warnings of heavy rain.

Speaking to reporters on Sunday, Marikkar said Mayor Vraie Cally Balthazaar had not carried out her duty of getting the city’s drains cleaned, the Daily Mirror reported. Hiru News carried the same remarks in Sinhala.

The charge

“Prior warnings were issued by the Department of Meteorology of heavy rains due to El Niño in the months of October or November. The mayor should have got the drains and culverts in Colombo City cleaned on time,” Marikkar said, according to the Daily Mirror. “Colombo City would not have been flooded on Friday if the drains were cleaned on time. Either the mayor should resign or President Anura Kumara Dissanayake should remove her from her post.”

Marikkar is a member of the Disaster Management Council, the Daily Mirror notes — a detail that bears on the standing of his criticism.

He argued that a council’s core work is routine rather than exceptional: scheduled weekly, daily and monthly waste collection, drain cleaning, mosquito fogging and replacing broken street lights. He said he had seen the Mayor post on Facebook the previous week about a drain built in her own ward, which he offered as evidence that the council was handling small projects while neglecting the system as a whole.

He also said Jawatte, the ward the Mayor represents, was itself flooded on Friday, and that the Colombo Municipal Council — one of the richest city councils in the region — had performed better under a former mayor, Muhammed Uvais Emitiyas, whom he described as a three-wheeler driver.

A call for residents to go to court

Marikkar’s sharpest proposal was not directed at the council chamber. He urged members of the public to take the Colombo Municipal Council to court over the violation of their fundamental rights, according to Hiru’s account — a route that would put the flooding before a judge rather than leaving it to a political argument.

He told the Mayor directly to stop bluffing, said there were limits to what the public would accept, and added: “You think you are the Mayor of London. You cannot even run the city of Colombo. Resign.”

Marikkar further alleged that neither the opposition leader of the Colombo Municipal Council nor any opposition member of the council had been invited to the post-disaster discussions held in the capital.

The opposition’s historical rainfall claims do not match each other

Marikkar supported his case with a comparison to past rainfall, saying the Meteorology Department had recorded over 400 mm in Colombo in 1992, and that important institutions such as the Colombo National Hospital were never affected by floods on those occasions.

That argument is the same one Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa made on Sunday night, but the figures do not line up. Premadasa cited 493.7 mm in 1993 and 440.2 mm in 2010; Marikkar cites over 400 mm in 1992. The two Samagi Jana Balawegaya figures name different years, and this desk has not verified either against Department of Meteorology records.

The underlying argument is also open to the same objection in both versions. The Meteorology Department’s account of 6 November rests on intensity — more than 100 mm in under an hour — rather than a daily or event total, and a large total spread over many hours makes very different demands on a drainage system than a smaller one concentrated in forty minutes.

Context

The Mayor has said Colombo’s drainage is designed for about 30 mm of rainfall and received close to four times that. Since the flooding, the council has begun a joint operation with the Army, UDA and other agencies to clear 60 identified drainage blockages and said it will take legal action over unauthorised buildings blamed for worsening the flooding.

Not reported

No response from the Mayor, the Colombo Municipal Council or the government to Marikkar’s remarks had been reported at the time of writing. Neither filing offers evidence for the maintenance claim beyond assertion — no inspection, audit, work order or canal survey is cited — and neither names a specific drain or catchment he says was neglected. Marikkar’s claim that opposition council members were excluded from post-disaster discussions is reproduced as his allegation and is not independently confirmed.

Outlets spell the Mayor’s name several ways, including “Vraie Cally Balthazar” and “Vraie Balthazar”; the MP’s name appears as both “Marikar” and “Marikkar”. This desk uses the spellings carried in its earlier coverage.