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THE good news of the start of what everyone expects to be a decent rainy season has been tempered by scattered damage to homes, schools and infrastructure with the Civil Protection Unit estimating that already close on US$100 million might be needed to repair damage and provide prompt support to those who need it.
The Government has been moving swiftly, both to help those hit by storm damage and this includes those who have no home after houses were damaged and schools that have to make alternative arrangements after roofs were blown off.
A whole civil protection system has been set up from district through provincial levels right up to a national Civil Protection Unit headquarters that can move quickly when something happens. Most of those involved have other full-time functions but they have been trained in emergency work and can quickly switch when something goes wrong.
While it is never possible to eliminate all risk and all potential damage, there is still a lot everyone can do, including all householders and schools and many local authorities. Much of this is taking action before the damage happens.
For example, roof sheets, especially on gable roofs, need to be securely fixed and over the years nails and screws can loosen or rust. Someone needs to climb up and have a good look, preferably before the vertically rotating winds of a major thunderstorm arrive and rip the sheets off the roof.
Everyone can check the roof of their house and schools and clinics can check their gutters and their roofs. The cost of refixing the sheets before they blow off, damage gables and walls and get twisted and bent, is very low. This will not prevent all roof damage, but will certainly cut it down.
It is noticeable that usually it is the roof of one block at a school that is damaged, the rest of the blocks being fine, and one house in a village, the rest again carrying on without damage. Generally roofs are designed to withstand heavy rain and normal storms. Cyclones might be something else but we can all brush up our normal maintenance.
Storm water damage is something that oddly enough surprises many Zimbabweans until the rains start falling.
Right now a lot of households and others are busy clearing storm water drains, including those in the street outside their premises, or are even digging better storm drains.
For some reason a fair number of people even fill in drains during the dry seasons or in drought years to extend their gardens or grounds and are then startled when water flows where it is not wanted.
In towns and cities local authorities are supposed to keep the street storm drains clear, but waiting for some inefficient council to do this duty might well result in more damage to your property, so doing it yourself or in collaboration with neighbours is often regrettably necessary. Drainage on private land is the responsibility of the landholder and should not be neglected.
The same sort of early checks and keeping up with maintenance schedules applies to infrastructure as well. Most of our infrastructure was designed to withstand extreme weather conditions, and the fact that most of it does so shows that our engineers and technicians knew what they were doing. But it does require maintenance and generally seeking remedial action before damage occurs is a lot cheaper than fixing the problem later.
Again, often it just needs drainage to be fixed in advance, since the force of even shallow streams or sheets of flowing water can do a lot of harm. Those foolish enough to chance crossing a low-level bridge with water flowing over the roadway even when that is only a few centimetres deep are often washed into the river, even when in a vehicle that must weigh well over 1 tonne. Flowing water is powerful and needs to be respected, and diverted to courses where it causes no damage.
A major problem in some urban areas, and particularly critical in central Harare, is blocked drains and resultant flooding with even a modest shower. Yet the Harare City Council must do a lot more than it has.
A few months ago, when the Environmental Management Agency was sent into central Harare to see what could be done it enforced the provision that every business property must have a public bin.
That diminished street litter a lot, except when the property owner was the municipality which did not think bins at bus terminuses and parks were necessary and was then startled when the drains in those areas were blocked and flooded.
At the same time many of those business bins need more frequent emptying, again a job for the city council.
It is all too common to see these bins overflowing and rubbish starting to heap up around them.
Enforcement is needed, and enforcement of litter laws is a good idea, but the council first needs to do its job of putting bins in public spaces and regular and frequent emptying of bins outside shops and those on its own properties.
This will save it digging out the catch-pits every other day and prevent floods.
The suggestion by some district offices of Harare City Council that people should pay more than their rates for clean up and drain clearing seems illegal as well as unethical.
While much has been done for effective reaction when civil protection units need to swing into action, and Zimbabwe is now far better served after that Second Republic revamp of the whole system, there is still a gap in enforcing prevention, and the laws and local authority by-laws have a lot to say on this, and the local authorities have a lot of responsibilities that they are simply not meeting.
Online Reporter