By: Nyima Sillah
The ward councillors of Ebo Town and New Jeshwang has pleaded to residents of the communities to help stop dumping waste materials in gutters in a bid to avert any future flooding during the rainy season.
Speaking exclusively to The Voice Newspaper, Councillor Habib M.L Ceesay, linked the past flooding in his ward to ‘illegal dumping’ noting that it causes blockages and rainwater floods that diverts into people’s homes. This does make it impossible for a lot of students to go school due to poor access to road.
“Flood causes wells in the communities to become contaminated and give easy access to mosquitoes and reptiles within that area which causes some health complications for the residents. Ebo Town is the biggest ward of our municipality so we are appealing to parliament and IEC to demarcate the ward. More so, the challenges are many like I said poor road network and drainage system and people are settling on waterways leading to flooding during raining season,” he said.
According to him, last year, government distribution to the flood victim was not sufficient to the victims, “only a few households benefited, Ebo Town Badala is a hotspot and when it floods, I can say 31% of the household are affected the distribution was not done properly.”
Badala is one of the biggest sub wards and all the water from Serrekunda, Bundung, Churchill Town, New Jeshwang come through Ebo town but they really mitigated flood last year compared to the previous years. Last year, he said, KM registered less flooding and the response was insufficient and inaccurate to the target beneficiaries.
He claimed his constituency does not get support from the government. “We got support only from the local government, and central government is not giving subvention to local government.”
“Following the disaster contingency multi hazards plan they have all the mitigation strategy e.g., to create access for temporal water ways, create paltriness in flood prone areas, create temporal water tank to avoid well water, clear illegal dumps to avoid blockages, establish local response team at local level to support affected families for shelter,” he added.
