The Lagos State Government will involve local government chairmen and Community Development Associations (CDAs) in ensuring that drainage channels are not blocked in the state.
The effort will also help sensitise the people and discourage them from dumping refuse in canals.
Permanent Secretary, Office of Drainage Services, Ayodeji Adenekan, who spoke while leading officials of the Office of Drainage Services, Lagos State Ministry of Environment, on an enlightenment tour and inspection of drainage across the state, urged residents to be conscious of their environment and cultivate the habit of proper disposal of waste.
Any waste that is not well disposed will return and constitute a nuisance to the neighbourhood, he said.
At the Morkaz/Awori collector drain in Dopemu-Agege, beside Salvation Army Nursery and Primary School and Dopemu Nursery and Primary School on Surulere Street, the drain was filled with pet bottles and other refuse, causing major impediments to free flow of flood.
Drain workers were seen collecting from the canal. A resident, Kazeem, said the pet bottles must have come from other sources in the neighbourhood where there are markets.
But Adenekan explained that canals flow across the state, stressing that the refuse found in one place does not mean that they were generated there.
At the drainage in Shyllon Street, Onipanu, drainage cleaners were at work, clearing and repairing a damaged underground drainage on Ikorodu Road near the Shyllon junction.
The inspection train moved to Oko-Oba primary channel, which crosses Oyatoki Street at Oko-Oba Agege.
“Anytime there was heavy rain, the channel will no longer be able to contain the water and it will begin to overflow causing flood as far as four houses.This recent flood was so much that it nearly drowned a nursing mother but for the help of people around,” Kafayat, a resident, said.
Adenekan, however, explained that the incident was a ‘flash-flood’ which happens occasionally when there is heavy rain whose volume of water was beyond the capacity of a channel; but after some hours, it will disappear.
He said: “This situation is not peculiar to Lagos or Nigeria alone; hence it is called flash-flood.
“The rain was falling more than the canal was flowing and normally with a flash –flood you find out that within a few hours the water will clear up.”
The Permanent Secretary assured the residents of government’s readiness to find solutions to the problem. He cautioned them to desist from dumping refuse in the gutter or canal indiscriminately.
Adenekan advised residents that patronise cart-pushers to desist from it because their actions constitute nuisance and threat to the efforts of the government at improving the environment because cart pushers do not have anywhere to dump their refuse but will wait till night and dump it in the canals.
