The Federal Roads Maintenance Agency (FERMA) on Sunday appealed to residents of Ikorodu in Lagos State to desist from the habit of drains stuffing, frustrating government’s efforts in combating flooding on the axis.
Mr. Tunde Adepoju, FERMA’s Engineer (FRME) in charge of Lagos East, made the call in a telephone interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). Adepoju said that drain- cleaning efforts were not yielding the desired results of combating flood across the state because drainage systems were usually stuffed almost immediately after evacuation, to compound flooding.
“We keep on educating people not to put waste or debris inside drains that have been constructed. “Before the rainy season some of those drains were cleared, when you go there now you will see that all those things are messed up. “And with the little resources that the agency has, it is not something that we can make people to be clearing every day,’’ he said.
He explained that FERMA had unveiled a public works team which cleared the drains in March, April and May, adding that the programme was supervised from the agency’s headquarters with spread across the nation.
He lamented that people had also built houses across coastal planes, thereby inhibiting flow of flood waters to the right outfalls originally constructed for them.
“Most of the cross falls, that is areas where water enters lagoon; when you get there, they have built houses; every single day they are reclaiming land, both Gbagada, both Ifako, all those areas.
“So we are having problem in rate of movement of water from the mainland even to the lagoon because all those sections are mostly built up now, that is number one.
Source: pulse.ng.com
