Africa-Press – Sierra-Leone. The rainy season has just started in Freetown, but already, lives have begun being lost due to heavy rains and massive flooding. A whole family of four perished yesterday when torrential rains caused a big wall to collapse and bury their home in the deluge. One person is still missing.
Freetown is now a veritable disaster scene when it rains. Many people tell our media that long gone are the days when heavy downpours of rain were looked forward to, because of the relaxing and lulling sensations they brought. Today, rain is abhorred in Sierra Leone because it has become a dangerous and life-threatening phenomenon and event.
Even the smallest volume of rain exposes Freetown to significant environmental risks, with heavy flooding that sweep through homes and other buildings, in some cases bringing down structures and carrying people and vehicles away; cause monumental property and financial losses and minor landslide in hilly settlements.
Though climate change can be blamed for the wicked weather affecting not just Freetown but the world, Freetown has been rendered a dangerous city waiting for a major weather – related disaster by a combination of man- created hazards ranging from deforestation, overpopulation, blocking of water pathways through thoughtless construction of houses on waterways, dumping of trash and clogging of the samba gutters through which water flows into the Atlantic Ocean and encroachment on hilly water catchment areas to build houses.
The sight of homes and buildings precariously perched on the towering hills above the city is awe-inspiring. How reckless can people be with their own lives building homes on steep hilly landscape whose soil has been stripped of trees, forests, boulders and stones that once provided solidity and stability to the ground. A major landslide worse than the one that struck Freetown in 2016, taking hundreds of lives, is a possibilty with heavy rains themselves helping to cause further erosion.
Successive governments should have done whatever it took to protect the forests straddling the mountains atop Freetown, and stopped people from building homes on the steep hills. But as we have learnt , it is the governments that have been granting people permits to endanger their lives by constructing houses up the hills.
Deforestation and irresponsible land use and blocking water pathways have placed Freetown in the dangerous predicament it finds itself. Governments should have stopped Informal settlements being established in vulnerable areas, like floodplains and steep slopes.
The present government must rise up to the challenge. It must institute measures to stop undesirable migration from the rural areas to the already overpopulated city, block unplanned urban development and building of shacks , destroy structures impeding water from flowing through the drainage systems and impose stiff punishments and even jail time for anybody caught dumping garbage in the gutters and waterways.
Despite the dire financial crisis , Sierra Leone must also give this a thought: Isn’t it time that we started thinking about moving the capital from Freetown, which has become overpopulated and environmentally unsafe?
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