Blame Annual Floods in Ghana on Engineering

The never-ending flooding in Ghana which has become an annual ritual in Ghana can be blamed on poor engineering works by contractors and engineers who construct our roads.

In recent times, a careful look at our roads shows the following engineering defects.

Most new roads mostly have just a drain on one side of the road and none on the other side. One cannot understand why contractors will estimate to construct drains on both shoulders and in doing the actual construction, construct just one. Where do we expect the flood water to pass? They will enter our homes and offices for sure.

In some instances, the drains were constructed long ago and most parts have broken. Such drains are often small because they were created long ago without considering the current fast-paced development in Accra which has led to the absence of enough space for water to flow freely after a heavy downpour.

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Again, our engineers need simple engineering knowledge to begin to fix the mess. Assuming you have two trains that are emptying their content into a third drain, common sense will tell you that, the third drain should be at least begin enough to receive the water from the two sources. However, our drains are not made like this. Very often, the third drain is just the size of the two others flowing into it. This means that the excess water from the second drain will flood the area in question.

Our drains have also been choked with rubbish and we fail to desilt them. Ghanaians also empty solid waste into the gutters and pour dirty water onto the street. This mentality is 10th century and dead. We wait as a nation until the rains set in before we take reactive actions. Ghana must be proactive decisions that will solve this problem forever. Underground drainage systems must be considered high on the agenda.

In some areas, the cylinders that have been buried in the ground as part of major drains, are either too small or chocked. This implies that the rainwater cannot pass through the drain easily, hence pressure mounts until the water begins to find its way.

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Accra’s flooding requires urgent action, situation analysis and out of the box engineering solutions and not the yearly breaking down out peoples properties only for the problem of flooding to emerging after a few minutes of rainfall.