SAWN Trending: Possible Causes of the Flash-flood and Mudslide

Ibrahim Mansaray and Ernest Yusif Tarawalie

In the words of the great Black-American liberal fighter Martin Luther King jr., “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” What happened in Freetown on the 14^th August 2017 is an unfortunate irreversible event. But more unfortunate for us as a nation would be our fear to come out boldly and ask those we’ve entrusted certain positions to look after our welfare in the city or nation to account for their actions. It is no secret that Freetown is disorganized in terms of housing and infrastructure.

It is the responsibility of any government in a civilised world to monitor, facilitate and create development opportunities for its citizens. When that role is tampered with or neglected, then the result is anarchy and catastrophe. That was what we saw happen in Freetown that disastrous night. A government that does not plan for the future, risk losing the lives of the very people it rules. There are key institutions in this country remunerated by tax-payers money to look after development and the environment: Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and Environment; Environmental Protection Agency; Ministry of Works, Housing and Infrastructure; and Office of National Security. These agencies and departments are given technical support—experts in the area of disaster management and environment studies—to monitor development activities in the city.

To start with, no one is allowed by law to undertake infrastructural activities in the country, especially in metropolis, without a greenlight from the ministry of lands, country planning and environment. The Regent area in Freetown was supposed to fall within the green zone—wild lives conservation and improved ecosystem— which had become a resort for the rich and powerful this recent. How they came to have building permits is in no doubt through the ministry of lands, the very institution charged with preserving the environment for improved ecosystem. Today their failure has cost us lives and properties, one of the biggest in the history of this country. This they did, and are still doing this, in the watchful eyes of the other institutions benefiting from tax-payers money.

We are also not disputing the fact that city sprawling is real and can be hard to stop; but we believe it can be managed, and that is the monitoring activity of the government. This is where the technical team from these offices that have been apparently failing us blundered. Our problems are rooted in systemic failure and lack of professionalism. It is not required of one to acquire a Bsc in Geology or whatever practical science field to make a prediction of what would happen if people encroached the green-zone/belt and started eroding the foot of a predominantly loamy or clayey soil hills. I want to believe surveillance looks at three major things: legality of site; topography of the site; and the soil structure of the site. These aforementioned institutions exist to complement each other, in instances where the ministry of land fail to respect the law, the Office of National Security should warn the parliament to ward off people from these sites lest catastrophes befall us, vice versa the other institutions.

Amadu Wurie Jalloh and Shebora S. Kamara

We believe what happened in Freetown was as a result of poor service delivery from the government. Video footage of the event circulated on social media show the water drainages being filled with waste and houses built upon them.

If you observe the type of waste we have in drainages across the country, you will notice close to 30 percent of the debris and dirt are plastics and rubbers. These are the produce of consumerism style. In many parts of the city, wells are not allowed to be dug, people rely on the government supplied water through their taps to drink and upkeep their lives. Because of the failure on the side of government to provide clean water supply to the growing population in a sprawling city, people have switchover to buying filtered water (dubbed Grafton) from enterprises with license to operate and sell water. As a result of this, they accumulate lots of plastic waste which could not decompose. Meanwhile these wastes are bagged hoping to be collected by city council that is charged to spear-head solid waste management in the city. They in turn would fail their duty causing people to ignorantly dump their waste in drainages when big rains come hoping to be transported to the seas. Because ministry of water resources cannot provide their basic services to the people of the country, they instigate a situation where people are left with no choice than to use of Grafton (plastic/rubber sealed water) which plastics could then be accumulated at home to be dumped by city council who would eventually not show up to; and so leaving the people with the one chance—dumping waste in the gutters—that is disastrous.

The other side of the matter is lack of proper and accurate supervisory monitory measures for the recent ongoing massive road infrastructural undertaken by the government and its partners across the country, Freetown to be specific. This flooding event could be connected to the engineer technics used to building our new roads and drainages. From what we have observed, most in-town (interior) drainages are not dug deep these days, the new mechanism allows engineers to rather design a tunnel-like drainage that could be transported to the construction sites to be fit in alongside others. Thereon the drainages are lifted off the natural topography of the places and filled with dirt and hard-pressed to have a levelled road. The houses are left sinking beneath these roads in most areas, water running from these places could not access the lifted main drainages for easy flow, thereon sand and rock particles and all sort of waste from these untarred interiors would accumulate along these roads blocking the gutter entrances resulting to flooding in the long run.

It is also quite a good measure when roads are designed to be disable friendly, which require the tops of the pedestrian walking area (on top of the gutters) to be sealed and smoothened for safe and easy wheelchair ride. But then there are lots of other measures to allow for that without closing gutters completely and allowing waste to settle therein and cause flooding in the near future. That could mean widening the road spaces and allowing for pedestrian (footpath) to be located over the gutters, allowing the gutters to have openings for cleaning exercise.

Ebun C. Sillah Jr. and Saidu Mahmoud Bah

Meanwhile we should not forget the role of centralization of services in relation to what happened. As we mentioned, video footages show houses build atop drainages and dangerous mountain tops, which permission they may have got from the Ministry of Lands, Country Planning and Environment. In that happened in Freetown in that sense should not be called flash-flood, but however human-flood. Literarily people have flooded the drainages that are meant for waters. In that case, the water had to overflow above the drainages dodging the barricaded gunners and making its way to the streets.

There are two reasons people have come to occupy these places, one being from centralization of government services and the market system, and the other being because of negligence and unprofessionalism from the side of the inline ministries and agencies that are charged with lands and the environment.

Government should decentralize their services to areas suitable for infrastructural activities in order to distract people from moving to the city. Many people are moving to the city to join the cooperate world and make ends meet. These people cannot afford constructing their houses outside Freetown in order not to miss their jobs or customer base.

Government should also move from the politics of winning votes into saving lives. In many instances they would deliberately allow people to undertake infrastructural activities in no-build zones just so they could not lose votes from frustrated families and communities. In that case they put both the citizens (settlers) and their political popularity at stake.