Qualla: 2014 Badulla Landslide

2014 Badulla Landslide: Introduction

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The workers on the Meeriyabedda tea estate in Koslanda would have been starting their day at 7:30 on the morning of October 29, 2014. Some had already left for the fields. Others were still inside the "line rooms" -- the long, narrow buildings divided into small living quarters that have housed Sri Lankan tea plantation workers and their families for generations. The hillside above them, saturated by weeks of monsoon rain, gave way without warning. A wall of mud and debris three kilometers long swept down the slope, flattening seven line buildings and burying roughly 150 families beneath it.

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2014 Badulla Landslide: Seven Lines, Gone

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Meeriyabedda estate sits in the Haldummulla division of Sri Lanka's Badulla District, tucked into hilly terrain 190 kilometers east of Colombo. Tea estates in this region follow a pattern established during British colonial rule: workers live in "lines," long barracks-style s...

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2014 Badulla Landslide: Buried Beneath the Numbers

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The people who lived on the Meeriyabedda estate were among the poorest communities in Sri Lanka. Plantation workers -- many of them descendants of Tamil laborers brought from southern India during the colonial era -- earn modest wages for physically demanding work in the tea fiel...

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2014 Badulla Landslide: A Hillside Waiting to Fall

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Landslides are not rare in Sri Lanka's central highlands. The combination of steep terrain, heavy monsoon rainfall, and increasingly destabilized hillsides creates recurring danger. In Koslanda's case, the hillside had been stripped of deep-rooted forest cover -- first by colonia...

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2014 Badulla Landslide: What Came After

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two days after the landslide, Sri Lanka's Disaster Management Centre issued a recovery plan outlining short-, medium-, and long-term strategies for the village, including the construction of replacement "resilient buildings." The document was a signal of intent, but for the survi...

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