How Government Can Address Flood In Nigeria _ Kenneth Iyamu

To contain the constant flooding in Nigeria, the government needs to build dams, levees, and dikes.

This was the view of a climate change expert, Air Commodore Kenneth Iyamu, in an interview with Arise News, monitored by TNC.

He said addressing the issue of flooding in Nigeria is very possible, but added that it will come at a very huge cost.

The climate change expert cited the 1927 flood in Mississippi, which displaced about 500,000 people, and how the government went back to the drawing board and invested in dams, levees, and dikes.

“You cannot start solving the problem without knowing the history. There are predisposing conditions,” he said.

“First of all I want to take you back to 1927 when the Mississippi Flood happened, that is the worst in history. You have about 500,000 people displaced. It took about $250 million to 1 billion to be able to address that.

“What did they do? They went back to the drawing board. They invested in dams, they invested in levees, and they invested in dikes. Now, addressing flooding is possible like the case in Nigeria but it will come at a very huge cost. You see from River Niger, coming from the Lagdo dam up to Anambra and Lokoja, there is no dam there.

“What are you going to do? You cannot put a dam without a levee and a dike. They all have different functions.

“The dam you put it at the upstream. It’s going to get water, it is going to collect water when it’s so large, and it is going to release it for the levees to protect and for the dikes to take. Again, along the way, there are spillover points. Spillover, because water is very important here because it’s very useful for our agriculture. The spillover point you take to an unvirgin area.

“So basically the government needs to build dams, build levees to try and hold, contain the amount of water.”

Iyamu also blamed the current flooding in the country on climate change.

“Climate change has come to live with us,” he said.

“Now what is climate change? The climate cannot simply go to regulate itself. But in technical terms, it’s the rise in the earth’s average temperature that has a monumental effect on the world’s weather and climate.

“Now, it became very obvious in 2017. In 2017, the ice in Antarctica, eight times the size of New York, which was supposed to take a decade to melt, melted in four years, adding 1.5 billion tons of water to the ocean. And that is 150 times the amount of water that could be used in the whole of the UK.

“So, climate change is increasing the possibility of the flooding that we’re having. It’s increasing because we live in the southern hemisphere. When you’re talking about climate, you’re talking about temperature and water. In the southern hemisphere, the temperature is unstable. We saw the trend coming since January. The snow was very very high. That was a very good sign because the snow is going to melt. When it melts, fresh water is going to join the ocean.

“And as I speak to you now, the atmosphere has 3,100 miles raised to power 3 of water in the atmosphere, and that’s just 0.001 of water in the ocean.

“So, climate change has aggravated a whole lot of floods.

“The World Meteorological Organization told us that there will be flooding, but the climate has the possibility of increasing it by 30 percent.

“What does that mean? You have rain that was supposed to fall in a year falling in 48 hours.”

Nigeria is currently witnessing its worst flood in over a decade. Reports say over 1.4 million people have been displaced, with 500 hundred reported to have died and thousands injured.

Two of the worst states hit by the disaster are Kogi and Anambra.

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