- Lekki Corridor, Ijede, Gberigbe, Okeletu in Ikorodu, others
The Lagos State government has advised residents living in flood-prone areas to temporarily relocate as the state continues to grapple with intense rainfall and flash flooding.
Tokunbo Wahab, the Lagos State Commissioner for Environment and Water Resources, made the warning during a live broadcast on Tuesday evening.
Wahab said that the state had already received early warnings from the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) and issued multiple advisories to residents ahead of the current flooding crisis.
“Let me start by saying to Lagosians, yes, we knew this was going to happen,” Wahab said. “NiMet gave us a forecast as early as March and by April, we had promised the advocacy, and we had briefed Lagosians about five times in the past three months.”
He explained that the flooding was largely due to a natural phenomenon the government had been anticipating, coupled with Lagos’ geographical vulnerability.
“What we said to Lagosians is that based on the prediction from NiMet, we are going to have much more rains this year than we had last year,” he continued.
“And for those who stay on the lowland of Lagos, they may have to move to the upland pending when the rain recedes.”
Wahab added that the government was not sitting idle, highlighting efforts made to mitigate the effects of flooding.
“On our part as a government, we’ve also ensured that we engage our emergency flood abatement gang effort all year round. In the past few months, they’ve been able to clean out our drainage system statewide,” he said.
He noted further, “As a state, we’ve also ensured we ramped up our capacity by providing resilient drainage infrastructure. We’ve done about 50 kilometres of secondary collectors in two years and about 38 of primary channels.”
Speaking on the causes of the recent flooding in parts of the state, Wahab said some were due to technical complications, such as in Ikorodu.
“In some areas like Ijede, Gberigbe, Okeletu in Ikorodu, what happened was the contractor had been on site. He dammed the downstream to allow construction. He didn’t know it was going to rain heavily,” he said.
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