Dakar: Senegalese Interior Minister Antoine Felix Abdoulaye Diome kneels in water in a suburb of the West African nation’s capital and surveys flood damage.
he is inspecting a house in the east for Massari District: For three days the first floor and courtyard are submerged in brown water.
Dragonflies hover over the marshy courtyard, which a lone pampa struggles to remove. Inside, the furniture has been raised off the ground.
The owner of the house declined to be named.
“They are incompetent,” he told AFP, pointing to the minister and his crew.
Anger is increasing over the increasing floods in the district. Dakaro.
Diom and other officials were incensed while visiting Keur Massar, and elsewhere in Dakar, protesters blocked a highway.
The city is regularly flooded due to July–October rains, involving about 3.7 million people. But the problem is getting worse. Heavy floods have occurred this year after only two days of rain.
The floods have happened even after the government has repeatedly promised a solution to the problem.
Moise David Ndaur, another Keur Massar resident, is also fed up. “Nothing has been done,” he says. “Some people have even gone so far because of this.”
Many expect more severe floods to occur as the rains continue.
According to experts interviewed by AFP, entire districts are built on soft soils on floodplains and close to water levels. Planning is haphazard and local authorities exercise little control.
Senegalese President Mackie Sall, when he came to power in 2012, launched a 10-year plan to deal with the floods, with a budget equal to about 1.14 billion euros ($1.4 billion).
Water pumps and culverts have been installed in some areas of Dakar, which have successfully avoided floods. However, other districts of the fast growing city have been left untouched.
Nearly a quarter of Senegal’s 16 million people live in the seaside city, which is under heavy construction pressure due to housing shortages.
According to a Senegalese geologist, the government has sought relief to flooded areas without dealing with the underlying causes of regular floods. get puppy gumbo.
“The nature of the soil should be taken into account in the construction of housing,” he said, adding that more studies of land and water levels are needed.
Free-for-all construction has exacerbated flooding, even as torrential rains subsided.
“It’s a very worrying paradox,” says Sheikh Guay, a geographer and researcher at the Dakar-based NGO Anda Tier-Monde.
“Less and less rain is causing more and more damage,” he says.
In Mabao, another suburb of Dakar, it hasn’t rained in three days, but the main road is still waterlogged.
Motorbikes, scooters and public transport vehicles can no longer use it.
“We have no choice but to get wet or use horse-drawn carriages to cross the road,” says Ibrahim Sisse, a local man with water dripping down his ankles.
In front of them are about a dozen people sitting on a horse carriage, which is common in Senegal but mostly used to transport goods.
Another local says, “There is a lot of damage, the shopkeepers cannot open.” “We have to get over this”.
But the geographer Sheikh Guay is a pessimist.
“We build in flood zones: new neighborhoods are built every day, and the same mistakes are made”.
he is inspecting a house in the east for Massari District: For three days the first floor and courtyard are submerged in brown water.
Dragonflies hover over the marshy courtyard, which a lone pampa struggles to remove. Inside, the furniture has been raised off the ground.
The owner of the house declined to be named.
“They are incompetent,” he told AFP, pointing to the minister and his crew.
Anger is increasing over the increasing floods in the district. Dakaro.
Diom and other officials were incensed while visiting Keur Massar, and elsewhere in Dakar, protesters blocked a highway.
The city is regularly flooded due to July–October rains, involving about 3.7 million people. But the problem is getting worse. Heavy floods have occurred this year after only two days of rain.
The floods have happened even after the government has repeatedly promised a solution to the problem.
Moise David Ndaur, another Keur Massar resident, is also fed up. “Nothing has been done,” he says. “Some people have even gone so far because of this.”
Many expect more severe floods to occur as the rains continue.
According to experts interviewed by AFP, entire districts are built on soft soils on floodplains and close to water levels. Planning is haphazard and local authorities exercise little control.
Senegalese President Mackie Sall, when he came to power in 2012, launched a 10-year plan to deal with the floods, with a budget equal to about 1.14 billion euros ($1.4 billion).
Water pumps and culverts have been installed in some areas of Dakar, which have successfully avoided floods. However, other districts of the fast growing city have been left untouched.
Nearly a quarter of Senegal’s 16 million people live in the seaside city, which is under heavy construction pressure due to housing shortages.
According to a Senegalese geologist, the government has sought relief to flooded areas without dealing with the underlying causes of regular floods. get puppy gumbo.
“The nature of the soil should be taken into account in the construction of housing,” he said, adding that more studies of land and water levels are needed.
Free-for-all construction has exacerbated flooding, even as torrential rains subsided.
“It’s a very worrying paradox,” says Sheikh Guay, a geographer and researcher at the Dakar-based NGO Anda Tier-Monde.
“Less and less rain is causing more and more damage,” he says.
In Mabao, another suburb of Dakar, it hasn’t rained in three days, but the main road is still waterlogged.
Motorbikes, scooters and public transport vehicles can no longer use it.
“We have no choice but to get wet or use horse-drawn carriages to cross the road,” says Ibrahim Sisse, a local man with water dripping down his ankles.
In front of them are about a dozen people sitting on a horse carriage, which is common in Senegal but mostly used to transport goods.
Another local says, “There is a lot of damage, the shopkeepers cannot open.” “We have to get over this”.
But the geographer Sheikh Guay is a pessimist.
“We build in flood zones: new neighborhoods are built every day, and the same mistakes are made”.
.