The Government’s Anti-Flood Task Force on Wednesday took an aerial tour of Accra to ascertain the resilience of the capital to floods ahead of the rainy season.
The aerial recce took the team to four flood basins in the capital with the view to have first-hand information on the situation on the ground.
The basins toured were the Sakumono Ramsar Site area, Tema Fishing Harbour area, Achimota and Weija.
From the air, it was observed that buildings were erected in water ways forcing a diversion of the natural course of the water ways and in the process narrowing them into the sea.
Briefing journalists after the tour, chairman of the task force and a Deputy Chief of Staff- in-charge of Operations at the Office of the President, Stan Xoese Dogbe, said the formation of the committee was necessitated by President John Mahama’s resolve to minimise, if not end, the effect of the perennial flooding in Accra.
“Our job is to find out where we have challenges; that is where do we have drains that are choked that we need to desilt, where we have channels through which rain water flows into the sea and where there are problems, we can see what engineering and mechanical solutions we can find to them,” he explained.
He said Wednesday’s aerial tour would be followed by a road recce to have a closer look at the situation with other regional capitals scheduled to be visited.
General Richard Kinney, Commander, Engineers Brigade, Ghana Armed Forces, said the flooding situation at Weija, one of the hotspots in the capital was generally a matter of indiscipline as people continue to build in low-lying areas.
“We’ll have this problem of flooding all the time because anytime the Weija dam is opened, or it rains, we’ll have that problem. The only solution is that, the city authorities would have to prevent people from building in the low-lying areas,” he noted.
Flooding in the the Achimota area, he observed was as a result of the adjoining streams and drains channelled into to the main storm drain.
“So the collection of water has now increased and we still have the same (size of) storm drain. Some part of the storm drain is collapsed and if we don’t tackle that issue, silt would be washed back into it and we’ll have the volume that it can take reduced and we’ll have water gushing out onto the land and cause flooding anytime it rains,” he said.
In Sakumono, he said the covers that collect water into the sea had become so small and could not contain enough volumes of water into the sea.
On his part, the Minister of Local Government, Chieftaincy and Religious Affairs, Ahmed Ibrahim, said there was much to be done adding that “most of the problems we are facing are human made”.
Other members of the Committee are the Minister of Water Resources Works and Housing, Gilbert Kenneth Adjei; National Security Coordinator, DCOP Abdul Osman Razak; Deputy Director-General of the National Disaster Management Organisation, Teddy Addi and Madam Marietta Brew, Legal Counsel to the President as Secretary.
BY JULIUS YAO PETETSI
