Sri Lanka Water Supply Still Suffers Effects of 2004 Tsunami
Sri Lanka's coastal drinking water supply continues to suffer the effects of the December 2004 tsunami. Much of the island nation's coastal area relies on wells, usually hand dug and relatively shallow. Some 40,000 such wells, each typically serving several families, were destroyed or contaminated by the tsunami, and the continued sustainability of the aquifers that supply such wells is in doubt.
Sri Lanka's coastal drinking water supply continues to suffer the effects of the December 2004 tsunami, which caused major death and destruction in the region. Much of the island nation's coastal area relies on wells, usually hand dug and relatively shallow. Some 40,000 such wells, each typically serving several families, were destroyed or contaminated by the tsunami. The continued sustainability of the aquifers that supply such wells is in doubt, due to continued saltwater contamination, erosion of beaches, and other human impacts, such as sand mining, increased pumping and pollution, according to an international team of scientists and engineers.
The 14-member team from the United States, Sri Lanka and Denmark, reports its findings in a paper scheduled for publication in the American Geophysical Union journal Water Resources Research. During investigations in Sri Lanka from February through September 2005, they found that the tsunami had affected coastal drinking water sources in several ways.