THE tsunami of December 2004 continues to haunt the residents of Sri Lanka. Their drinking water is still contaminated with seawater long after the ocean surged over the island’s coastline, and it will take several monsoon seasons before the aquifers recover.
So says an international team of water resource engineers and scientists led by Tissa Illangasekare of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, who surveyed the coastal groundwater resources of Sri Lanka between February and September 2005.
The findings are disheartening. Nearly 40,000 wells have been destroyed or contaminated. When the sea swept 1.5 kilometres inland it filled the…
