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WE hope that all Zimbabweans will take note of the forecast of the Meteorological Services Department of very heavy rains moving into Zimbabwe over the next few days, and take precautions, especially those outlined by the forecasters and by the Department of Civil Protection.
Much of the advice is common sense, and most people are willing to take it. But we know to our cost that there are areas prone to flooding when there are major sustained storms, and where people keep rebuilding despite seeing their homes washed away every two or three years, and people who are so impatient that they risk their lives in trying to cross fast-flowing rivers and streams or cross bridges that have a fast water flow over their carriageway.
Others seem to think they are immune to lightning, many consider storm water drains an unnecessary luxury only wanted by crackpots, and in any case all will be fine on the night.
This is why the Department of Civil Protection has had to stockpile helicopter fuel, has had to create supply dumps of essential goods, and has had to put together the hard-won experience by its district committees to minimise risk and cope with any serious problems.
This would be necessary in any case, since however careful you are as an individual, there will still be problems you cannot guard against.
But a fair amount of the preparation is also to deal with more preventable disaster, which hopefully will lead to more care in future, but that attitude of we will do it tomorrow does not help minimise risk this weekend.
As the department notes, many of us know if we live in an area prone to flooding, and where the safe bits of land are.
And we need to cast our minds back a few years when we do this, since flood risk is not just on low-lying ground. Streams and rivers can burst their banks and we have seen the extra runoff from major development on hillsides, such as in Borrowdale, flooding houses that otherwise seem to be fine.
Many of the suburbs set up by land barons and corrupt officials are likely to face special problems. For a start in some areas wetlands were sold off for building, and this weekend is likely to be the first time in several years where the reason for the “wet” part of the word is likely to become very clear.
Even in legal and planned suburbs, we have seen development allowed to encroach into vleis, which both reduces the sponge effect of a wetland as well as increasing risks to the new development.
The land-baron suburbs also have close to zero in the way of storm water drains to shift the high runoff into the streams and rivers.
Again the problem is not confined to these areas, since many property owners in the older suburbs have skimped on maintaining their storm water drains or even filling them in.
Some councils, such as Harare, have not been going round enforcing their own by-laws and making people clean out the drains running past their property, and when there is high run off there will be local flooding.
It might only last a few hours, but it takes just a few minutes for a flow of water through your front door to mess up your house.
So a lot of neglect, by some local authorities and by a swathe of property owners, is going to be very apparent. Hardly any of this will be severe enough to trigger the local district civil protection committee, but it will cause suffering and inflict damage.
Most of the problems will be these ones of neglect, but we will also have those who create their own problems.
One, that for some reason arises every year, is people risking crossing a river or stream over a ford or low-level bridge. Many erroneously think it is just a problem of shallow water, and so long as the water is just axles deep this is not a problem.
But there is a major difference between crossing a pool of water and crossing a fast flowing stream. The force of the flow of even a shallow stream is very high if the flow is fast.
It increases in proportion to the square of the velocity so a bit of extra speed gives a lot of extra force. So crossing the water courses without having a bridge with its carriageway out of the water is very dangerous.
So people should sit and wait. This used to happen almost automatically. When the low level bridges opened up the country in the 1920s and 1930s, people travelling in the rainy season automatically packed a food basket and were prepared to camp out at a river bank for several days, waiting for the water to go down.
High level bridges made this unnecessary, and now people seem to resent even a short wait at a low-level bridge.
A lot of the disaster preparedness we now enjoy is permanent, rather than something put together at the last moment. Cyclone Idai set a lot of new standards.
This is just how bad it can get, so if you can cope with something like that then you can cope with the rest of it.
This is just good planning. Prepare for the worst and then you are fixed for the not so bad, but still dangerous events.
And it is fairly obvious that the Department of Civil Protection has been preparing for a whole lot of potential disasters, and has set up networks of people in every area who have a reasonable idea of what to do, including local evacuation plans, and can reach whole communities.
This means that even the worst can be managed better, when we all have to run for it, and the damage from lesser events can be lessened.
This is the sort of attitude we need to take with our own property, our own lives. We may simply sail through heavy rain and a set of severe storms, and many of us will. But if we are ready for something worse, then we can cope.
And something worse can be anything from a flooded drain, a branch shorting out a Zesa line, to our road becoming a river and flowing down our drive, or some other major problems.
So lets us not ignore the advice, or suggest that the advisors are some sort of fuss-pot, but accept there are a lot of ways we can minimise risks and take them.
Online Reporter