Villagers living near the Arau dam in northeastern Nigeria have long told government officials that the dam’s structure is failing and the reservoir behind it is too full.
But in early September, after heavy rains, six officials looked down at the water-filled reservoir, stampeding their feet in the mud, trying to reassure Nigerians that the dam was in good condition. .
Alhaji Bukar Tijani, a senior government official leading the delegation, said on the same day that “the dam is not broken.” “People shouldn’t be afraid.”
Four days later, water broke through the Arau dam wall, submerging two-thirds of the city of Maiduguri, killing up to 1,000 people and displacing nearly 500,000, rescue and security officials said.
After the disaster, government officials blamed God, climate change and Maiduguri’s poorest people for putting themselves at risk by living in cheap houses along the Ngadda River.
But in reality, government agencies knew the dam was badly damaged and, despite repeated warnings from both local residents and engineers who spent six years studying the dam, repaired it. or correct any operational errors.
Eight months before the dam collapsed, one of its engineers, Mara Gutti, warned dam officials that the structure was under intense water pressure and was at risk of a “catastrophic collapse.”
Mr. Gutti said in an interview that officials said they were aware of the problem and were taking action. Nigerian media found budget lines showing that funds were repeatedly allocated to repair the dam. However, local residents said no steps were taken to repair it or relieve the pressure.
“Unfortunately they are really incompetent," said Gutti, who conducted the study with colleagues from the University of Maiduguri. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
The government’s failure to prevent the Arau dam disaster has raised concerns that more than 300 other dams in Nigeria are “in dire need of maintenance”, according to local non-governmental organization Connected Development. .
Alkali Lawan, an official with the Borno state water resources ministry, of which Maiduguri is the state capital, said Maiduguri should serve as a warning even to local authorities, adding: “Others should learn from Arau dam.” “It’s a very big disaster.”
don’t panic
Heavy rains fell in northeastern Nigeria in August. But many residents remained unmoved because the government said there was no danger. Many people lived downstream of the Maiduguri dam. Maiduguri is an ancient center of learning and has been hit hard in recent years by violence by Boko Haram insurgents.
One night in September, around midnight, water burst through the dam and rushed toward the city.
As water invaded his home, tailor and candy vendor Adama Ibrahim knew he had to rescue himself and his four-year-old son Mahmoud. She gathered her few belongings and ran to a nearby bridge.
In an instant, “the water rose from my knees to my hips to my chest and neck,” she said.
All she could do was keep Mahmoud’s head out of the water, hug his small body to her chest, and pray for help.
Assistance took hours. When some men arrived in a truck, they took only the children with them. Ibrahim handed over the clingy, affectionate infant Mahmoud, not knowing whether either of them would survive.
“Just go,” she told her son.
When she was finally thrown, half drowned, into a rescue truck, she said she saw a woman and child crushed to death by panicked people who had rushed into the car.
The city went wild around them.
Fishermen near the dam were capsized and drowned by the rushing water. One woman said she saw dozens of her neighbors, including children, being swept away and dying as they tried to escape. People with disabilities who used to beg outside government offices have disappeared.
Ibrahim scoured the devastated city looking for Mahmoud. She felt like she was losing her mind. After three days, she finally found him.
Nigeria’s emergency management authorities have refused to release the death toll, but local residents, rescue workers and security personnel who were not authorized to speak publicly say the death toll is as high as 1,000. .
issue an alarm
Most residents of Maiduguri had never experienced severe flooding. The city, located just on the edge of the Sahel, is dry for most of the year. The water comes from the small Arau Dam, built of masonry and earth in 1985 by Greek contractors for the federal government in hopes of improving water supply to Maiduguri and nearby farmland.
The villagers, a community of about 2,000 people who lived near the dam and fished in its waters, quickly realized there was a problem.
It was announced in 2021 that cracks appeared in the dam’s earthen embankment and a concrete channel designed to drain excess water began to collapse. They alerted authorities to the deteriorating state of the dam and the need for more water to be released. They told local councils, the military, federal agencies responsible for monitoring, maintaining and repairing dams, and just about anyone who would listen.
“We complained many times,” said Shettima Mohammed, 70, a farmer and fish merchant from Rawajeri village. But he and other villagers said authorities ignored warnings, made excuses for not taking action, and occasionally delivered sandbags in a futile attempt to shore up damaged embankments.
Villagers were not the only ones who raised the alarm.
Gutti, an engineer at the University of Maiduguri, began researching the dam in 2017. He and his team discovered that the agency overseeing the dam, the Chad Basin Development Authority, had spent years, perhaps decades, filling the dam with water before opening. That floodgate.
Gutti said the first principle of dam safety is to not overflow. However, according to his research, this was repeated over and over again, creating strong water pressure on the dam.
“Every year they keep making the same mistakes,” he said in an interview.
In addition to the pressure on the dam, authorities were filling it with silt, which greatly reduced the room for rainwater to enter, engineers said. The combined effects caused the dam to crack and collapse, Gutti said.
Mohamed Zanna, the agency’s acting executive director, acknowledged in a telephone interview that the dam had been suffering from damage for several years. He confirmed that the locks are only opened and closed once a year and said his agency does not have sufficient funds for dredging.
But he denied that the reservoir had ever been full, that he had been warned by engineers, or that the dam had burst due to flooding. Instead, they argued that the destroyed earthen embankment was not part of the dam because it was not made of concrete. He also defended his decision to tell the public that the dam was not in danger before the flood.
He blamed the floods on increased rainfall due to climate change.
water is gone
Humanitarian agencies and government officials have warned that the next disaster facing Maiduguri will be severe water and food shortages.
Crops that could have fed 1.6 million people for six months were destroyed in the floods, said Chi Rael, a spokesperson for the United Nations World Food Program. And with the dam breach, farmers say there will not be enough water to grow next season’s rice, sorghum and sweet potatoes.
Currently, residents of Maiduguri must rely on the few working wells that have not been contaminated by floodwaters to survive.
Since the disaster, officials have descended on the Arau dam, promising to restore or rebuild the dam. Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has said that all dams in the country will be inspected for health.
“We are assuring Nigerians that this will end well,” Water and Sanitation Minister Joseph Utseff said this month at a meeting of a new committee tasked with assessing Nigeria’s dams.
For residents of Maiduguri, the aftermath of the floods is yet another tragedy to contend with. The region is home to hundreds of thousands of people who fled Boko Haram after it killed and kidnapped tens of thousands of people in recent years.
Fatima Mara, one of the Boko Haram survivors, clung to a tree with her children for hours after the dam burst, convinced they would all drown. However, she manages to keep them alive until they are rescued.
Since the floods, Mara and her family have been sleeping in the median of the highway, the highest point they can find. Her husband sold his cell phone for $2.50 to buy food for their children. It was their last possession.
Mara recently wondered how she would survive as she waited in line for a cash handout from a Catholic humanitarian agency. The family was preparing to return to the tarpaulin tent they had lived in for six years, but it was half destroyed and covered in mud.
She has no idea how to get water.
Even before the flood, her family had been going to a nearby home that had a well to beg for water. Now all those boreholes are contaminated.
“With Boko Haram, you can sleep if you run away. This makes it unlikely that we will survive,” she said. “For me, the floods are worse than Boko Haram.”
