The area around the Bormeh dumping site is considered at great risk for a large-scale disaster as the rainy season continues to bring heavier and heavier rains.
Some of the steel culverts that help transport water from the south side of Bai Bureh Road under the road and to the sea have collapsed and there is a gigantic build-up of garbage that has formed a plug and prevents the normal amount of water from passing through.
Once this water has built up enough pressure, which could occur during a heavy rainstorm, the “obstruction in the drainage channels can very quickly cause waters to back up and cause further localized flooding,” a report from the World Bank said. The report was created in 2017 shortly after the flooding that occurred last August, which left five people dead or missing.
During a field test at the site, a number of potential risks were identified in the World Bank’s report. There are two culverts of corrugated metal piles that were originally installed to enable the flow of water, which have, over time, collapsed with the weight of accumulated solid waste and are now destroyed. On top of the culverts, there are 25-meter-tall walls of garbage that have been accumulated below Bormeh, downhill from the Upgun turntable, and the steep slopes of waste present a high risk of potential collapse.
This would cause severe water build-up upstream from the site and increase the risk of continued flooding. A collapse would be extremely dangerous for workers around Bormeh and for residents in the dumpsite’s vicinity, as well as downstream to Cline Bay.
In terms of health and safety, the contaminated water that drains from the dumpsite gets released directly into the stream, which is widely used by residents for washing and crop watering. This is considered an immediate health and safety hazard.
Finally, a large environmental risk is that the waste is dumped in the river bed, carried downstream, and washed out to sea, contaminating the coastal area.
“That is a disaster waiting to happen,” said Mike Joyce, a supervising foreman with Dawnus International, a firm that has done numerous construction projects in Sierra Leone and that the UNOPS hired to regulate the earth beneath the Motormeh slide area. “I’ve been down there myself and looked at it with the guys from the UNOPS. They’ve dug down to them and there are sheer faces of maybe 25 meters of waste. If those culverts block and the water backs up behind the road, near the embankment, when the water breaks through, it will erode the bottom and it will fall in. Then, it will cause a dam, then it will back up more, and when there’s enough pressure it’ll flood everything downstream and it will take a lot of that rubbish with it, and a lot of it will end up in the sea.”
Presently, there has been no formal warning, call for evacuation, or attempt to prevent the risk of flooding from the government. The ONS failed to respond to multiple attempts for comment, but the EPA said that they have planned to do a radio and television show for one hour for the next four Wednesdays (July 25, August 1, 8, 15) to inform people of the flood risk areas around Freetown.
James Kamara of the EPA’s public relation’s team said that the time was not confirmed but they were aiming for the hour-long show to go from 4 to 5 in the afternoon.
The UNOPS is attempting to acquire the money to help mitigate the potential damage and it believes it has “the contingency funding in place to do it, but of course it takes time to get that money.” If the UNOPS gets the funding, they will have the rights and the vehicles to go in and help mitigate as much damage as possible.
In its report, the World Bank noted that the “shacks” and “temporary housing” in the culvert area were at the most risk to the floods that could occur. It also noted that 72% of employed adults in the area are labeled as “petty traders” or “street vendors” who have a lower ability to overcome such damage and loss of infrastructure.
During the two instances of flooding in the area around Bormeh in 2017, which took place on August 14 and August 26, the report stated that more than half of the households in the neighborhood were affected in some way, with the average household losing 50% of its total assets. Further, more than Le2 billion were estimated in damages to the real estate, education, and transport sectors apiece during last year’s flooding at Culvert. Nine school buildings were damaged in the process.
JR/18/7/18
By Jack Russillo
Thursday July 19, 2018.
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