Member of the Environment and Science Committee of Parliament, Hamza Adam has asked the government to invest in rain water harvesting as a measure of addressing the perennial floods in Ghana.
The legislator for Kumbungu Constituency told Alfred Ocansey on 3FM Sunrise that though floods are causing a lot of problems, they can also be solved profitably. One of the creative and profitable ways to handle floods is harvesting of the flood water.
He stressed on the need to have a policy and a programme for water harvesting to take advantage of the runoff generated by the rainstorms like it is being done in other places of the world.
“There are areas that experience flood during rains but after the flood, they experience draught” he noted that water harvesting will be very beneficial to the people in those areas.
Water harvesting generally refers to the collection of rainstorm-generated runoff from a particular area (a catchment) in order to provide water for human, animal, or crop use. Also, the harvested water from the runoff can be stored in fire hydrants to help in fire fighting.
Currently, the number of fire hydrants in Ghana are woefully inadequate; a situation that the Ghana National Fires Service has been complaining about for a while.
Lack of access to hydrants poses serious challenges to fire fighters whenever their fire tenders run out of water during fire fighting. Firefighters depend on external water sources other than the water in the tender to fight bigger fire outbreaks and fire hydrants guarantee a steady and secure water supply from underlying water networks.
Hamza Adam wants efforts towards public education and sensitization on human attitudinal contributions to the floods intensified, as well as effective punishments for people whose actions contribute to the flooding situation in Ghana. This will serve as a deterrent and motivation for people to do the right things within the environment.
By Samuel Afriyie Owusu|3news.com|Ghana