The National Early Warning and Response Mechanism Centre in Nigeria has released its plans to mitigate flooding across the country, The Nation report.
The Senior Technical Adviser on Disaster Risk Management in the Office of the Vice-President and Director General of the Early Response Centre, Dr. Olufemi Oke-Osanyintolu, addressed reporters in Abuja, the nation’s capital, on the plan.
The occasion was for the National Seasonal Prediction and Flood Outlook for 2019.
On the technical committee on flooding, which was inaugurated on April 19, the early response centre noted that as part of its deliberations, it considered the Nigerian Meteorological Agency’s (NIMET’s) seasonal rainfall prediction and the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency’s (NIHSA’s) annual flood outlook for this year.
The report also details the states affected, classifying them into three categories in relation to the flooding: severely impacted, mildly impacted and moderately impacted.
It said 14 states were classified as severely impacted; they include Niger, Kebbi, Kogi, Benue, Adamawa, Delta, Lagos and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Oke-Osanyintolu said workshops on flood prevention, mitigation and preparedness will be held in three stages, according to the severity classification of the flood impact and identified stakeholders.
He said: “We will carry out the workshop to sensitise the people in these affected areas and reduce the morbidity and mortality usually associated with flood disaster.
“All key stakeholders, from the state to the local and Federal level, are in the committee.
“We will carry out the workshop to sensitise the people in these affected areas and reduce the morbidity and mortality usually associated with flood disaster.
“We have established transparency, effective communication between the stakeholders. We are putting a lot of things in place from the grassroots.
“The committee has identified the challenges that flooding causes the country annually and has decided that it will apply all effective strategies to curb it from this year onwards.”
Also, the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has said poorly funded emergency management agencies at the state level constitutes a huge challenge to its effort to prevent emergency situations, including flooding, to address such situations when they occur.
NEMA’s Head of Operations at the Yola Operations Office, Abani Garki, spoke yesterday at a stakeholders’ consultative meeting in Yola, the Adamawa State capital, where the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA) reiterated a warning that 74 local government areas would be highly probable to be affected by flooding this year, while 279 others fall under “probable flood risk local government areas”.
“The absence of strong and well-founded SEMAs in most states makes things difficult for NEMA as situations that should be handled by SEMAs are left for NEMA, which gets weighed down by manpower and technical challenges,” Garki said.
The stakeholders’ consultative meeting in Yola, which was meant for agencies and NGOs with related crisis-mitigating mandates to rob minds, featured the acting Zonal Coordinator of the Nigeria Hydrological Services Agency (NIHSA), Aliyu Muhammed, who reminded the meeting of the local government areas that are likely to be affected by flooding as the rainy season deepens.
A study of the “Annual Flood Outlook 2019” prepared by NIHSA, which Aliyu Muhammed provided, indicates that in Adamawa State, Guyuk and Lamurde are “highly probable flood risk local government areas” while Demsa, Fufore, Gombi, Numan, Shelleng, Yola North and Yola South fall in the category of “probable flood risk local government areas”.
The Minister of Water Resources, Suleiman Adamu, who wrote the foreword to the Annual Flood Outlook 2019, noted that in the seven years of NIHSA predicting probability of flood events, “the level of accuracy of the forecast has improved significantly”.
He said the flood level of last year was similar to that of 2012.
But that improved monitoring and heightened awareness created by NIHSA reduced the devastation of flooding last year.
Adamu advised that this year’s flood alert should be given the required attention.
Akwa Ibom, Delta, Imo, Jigawa, Kano, Lagos, Osun, Oyo, Rivers and Sokoto are the states with at least 10 local government areas to be affected by highly probable or probable flood risk this year, according to NIHSA’s Annual Flood Outlook.
