Joi Ito picked up on my contribution on a mailing list about what is happening there.

It’s hard to overestimate the difficulty of what will be involved in getting Sri Lanka moving again. The big problem, as Joi says, is the lack of transport. At the best of times, it takes 6 or 8 hours to get from Colombo, the main port, to Gaul, in the south, even though it is only about the same distance as from Dublin to Waterford (a hundred miles or so). Much of the road runs along the sea, which will make things a lot worse. So everything depends on airlifts at the moment. It is a monumental task to airlift food to provide for millions of people.