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We can avoid deaths arising from floods
The rainy season is back. And with it come storms, floods, lightning, landslides and so on. Plantations, homes, businesses and sometimes, life, are destroyed by the wrath of nature.
An example is the Sunday morning downpour in the city and neighbouring districts. Seven people, this newspaper reported yesterday, died in floods in two separate incidents after walls collapsed on them during dawn rain. Five people of the same family, including a mother and four of her children, died in Seguku on Entebbe Road when a fencing wall of their neighbour collapsed during the rain.
In another incident in Kikajjo zone, Namasuba also on Entebbe Road, a collapsing perimeter wall weakened by floods killed a mother, Immaculate Namaganda, and her daughter only identified as Galanyi. Kampala suffers from flooding whenever it rains heavily partly due to poor drainage, poor infrastructural planning and wetland degradation.
The existing drainage channels in the city have not helped either. Some of the channels do not have the capacity to carry the big volumes of water.
Human settlements and industrial development have extended to the low-lying areas on the banks of the drainage channels, which are part of wetlands. Consequently, businesses are disrupted as several city shops close, the traffic gridlock intensifies, houses in the slums – usually wetlands - are washed away and others are submerged in water. It is needless to remind ourselves of the Bududa mudslides, the various incidents of lightning over the years and the Teso floods, among others.
But what we need to take into account going forward is that once bitten, twice shy. One of the objectives of the 2003 Drainage Master Plan was to construct tributaries into Nakivubo drainage channel, but so much has changed and new ideas are the way to go.
Kampala Capital City Authority has over the past year developed a master plan to handle floods and related disasters. Some of the proposed strategies include:
- Rain water harvesting.
- Permeable surfaces to enable runoff of water.
- Rain gardens.
-Establishment of green parks and open gardens.
- Filter strips: Vegetated (usually grassy).
- Bio-retention areas (Landscaped shallow depressions)
- Detention ponds.
- Retention basins and associated wetlands.
Besides fast-racking these, we should be well aware that the trouble before us is a self-inflicted one. We did not respect the wetlands, we did not plan our urban settlement well enough and we have eaten up most of the green spaces. Mother nature is just retaliating.
