Flooding: Before Disaster Strikes

What began like a normal rainfall penultimate Sunday, gradually increased in torrents and then graduated into heavy downpour and 13 hours later, left Nigeria’s foremost commercial nerve-centre, Lagos, thoroughly devastated. In the end, more than 25 corpses, including those of 11 children, littered the city.

The corpses were recovered from two canals at Dopemu and Aboru, in old Alimosho Local Government Area, and Agbado-Oke Odo Local Council Development Area, LCDA, among other areas, even as property worth several billions of Naira were destroyed.

According to an eyewitness, five occupants of a Toyota car that was maneuvering through the flood drowned when, unable to distinguish between actual thoroughfare from the death traps, the driver reportedly ran into a ditch  In another account, a 22-year old man, Muri Olanrewaju, slipped into and died in a sewage pit that was already submerged by flood at No.16, Adesokan Street.

On June 22, 2011, Nigeria’s largest Northern City of Kano, suffered similar fate when an unusual heavy rain flooded a neighborhood, leaving 24 people dead, dozens injured, 300 hundred displaced and about 100 houses destroyed in the densely populated Fagge neighborhood.

Fagge Local Government Area administrator, Abdulmalik Isamail Rogo told newsmen that elders in the area had told him that never had they witnessed such torrential rain in 30 years.

And only recently, Cross River State, also witnessed similar flooding occasioned by heavy downpour, leaving scores of lives lost, and property worth billions of naira destroyed.

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) reported that last year alone, flooding affected around half a million people in two-thirds of the 36 states of the federation. Scores of the victims also lost their lives.

Statistics by the African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD) covering the period under review revealed that West Africa as a whole witnessed increased flooding in recent years due mainly to climate change, with 2.2 million people affected in 2010 alone and more than 500 people killed.

With at least 118 deaths, according to ACMAD, Nigeria last year recorded the highest cases of flood-linked deaths followed by Ghana (52) and Benin Republic (43).

Being flood-prone, due to its proximity to the coastal areas, the South West geo-political zones organized a roundtable consultative meeting in October 2010 to address the problem. The roundtable identified among other things indiscriminate property development along the flood plane and dumping of refuse along water ways as major causes of flooding and therefore recommended effective monitoring of such activities in such areas.

On its part, NEMA early this year, warned that the nation would witness greater rainfall which will result in huge floods.

Considering the extent of devastation already witnessed in some parts of the country, it is doubtful if the NEMA warning was taken seriously.

With more rains ahead and the likelihood of floods inevitable, unless urgent steps are taken to sensitise the populace, we are bound to witness even more devastation.

Governments, particularly those within the Niger Delta region, must take emergency measures to open up blocked drainages, and, if possible, demolish structures built on waterways, while the citizenry must be more proactive in the fight against blockage of waterways.

We say so because; the prevention of flooding should not be seen as government’s sole responsibility.

The decision of the Rivers State Government to replace open surface with sub-surface drainages in major areas of the city of Port Harcourt is highly commendable and should be emulated by other governments in the region.

However, while the construction of the sub-surface drainages is still going on, residents of areas where open surface drainages are still in use, should ensure that they are not used as refuse dumps as has been the practice.

The regular environmental sanitation exercise must be seen as an opportunity to ensure that such drainages are opened for free flow of water at all times.

It is only by such collective effort that the nation can avert disasters of bigger magnitude comparable to the Asian tsunami.