Agency warns states against impending flood

The Nigerian Hydrological Service Agency (NHSA) has warned state governments to brace up for impending flood and avoid fire brigade approach and start preparations for flood before the rainy season.

This follows the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) Seasonal Rainfall Prediction that the country may experience longer period of rainy season in 2020 compared to the previous years.

NHSA Director-General, Clement Nze, who gave the warning during a media briefing yesterday in Abuja, said state governments must be prepared to tackle both the white flood, which occurs during rainy season and the black flood that occurs during dry season.

According to him, “the country is currently in the dry season and it is right time to prepare for flood, open the drainage, remove the structures within the flood plain, and ensure adequate sensitisation programmes.”

Nze said indicators had shown that there would much rainfall but if there are adequate drainage systems, if houses are not built along the flood path, the flood will be conveyed appropriately but where are no channels, even little amount of rainfall could cause flood.

He, however, lamented that the country is not adequately dammed as it has only about 200 dams with about 56 large dams, wherein other countries with the same land mass as Nigeria, like Canada, has about 933 large dams, while China or India has thousands of large dams.

“The more dams in the country, the more it would be easy to control flooding. Dam serves a lot of purposes. The first is flood control, irrigation, hydropower and several others. It is unfortunate that Nigeria’ does not have enough dams.”