Over the past few years, mother nature has changed its ways, because we changed ours. Homes and businesses have been affected by a combination of factors like increased rainfall and the resulting overflow from rivers, especially in coastal areas.
Even for those residents in flood-susceptible areas or riverine communities, marshy lowlands, the method and character of angry cloudburst during a flood, is problematic and fraught with imponderables that are difficult to predict.
At least 25,000 people have died annually since the 80s in Africa from flood with 11 million more affected.
Last year, floods in East Africa provoked massive flooding, landslides, and overflow of several dams across Rwanda, Kenya, Somalia, Burundi, Ethiopia and Uganda. In recent times, Tanzania has spent over US$2 billion annually to manage flood. Landslides from flood took tolls in West Pokot, Kenya where 54 people died.
In Cunene Province of South Angola, Heavy rains submerged homes and damaged properties worth billions.
Mozambique lost assets and properties to 2013 floods estimated to cost over a tenth of its GDP to the tune of US$500m.
Nigeria experienced one of its worst floods in a century in 2012 – properties worth about US$10 billion were destroyed. Borno State in North-Eastern Nigeria had its worst flood in 7 years displacing over 20,000 people.
In 2019, flash floods happened in Tunisia and Algeria as well.
How ready is your community?
Homes may flood from prolonged rain over a long period of time. Internal issues like sewage leak, plumbing failure or extreme weather conditions, water-control structures like dams or levees may fall apart with devastating consequences.
Communities must pursue building approaches to withstand flood and erect structures above flood levels. In building homes and facilities, barriers should be created to prevent the ingress of floodwater into homes with high points using hard-wearing bricks or concrete or sandbags.
Encouraging tree planting across wetlands could create a wooded bulwark to break the speed of floods, check river overflow and arrest deforestation.
Farming or agrarian communities prone to flood may, with the assistance of local authorities, build flood storage reservoirs to hold back floodwater, collect excess rain and runoffs. Such reservoirs may be channelled to farms for irrigation purposes.