Flood Disaster: An Empirical Survey of Causative Factors and Preventive Measures in Kaduna, Nigeria (Published)
Flood is a water induced disaster that leads to temporary overflow of dry land and causes serious damage on lives, property, and infrastructures. Flood has created a lot of damaging effect in Nigeria, resulting to the death of people, collapse of buildings, destruction of properties, damage of agricultural produce, loss of land and increased government expenditure. Despite persistent occurrence of this disaster, there is limited research geared at studying the factors that cause flooding and measures to effectively control it. To fill this gap, a random survey was conducted on 40 households, community leaders and agencies responsible for the management of flood in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Relative Important Index (RII) was employed for ranking the factors and the preventive measures. From the result, the common factors that cause flooding were poorly constructed drainage, heavy rainfall and improper waste disposal. Preventive measures for flooding were proper dumping of refuse, awareness of the public on the need to adhere to environmental rules, empowerment of government agencies to monitor residential building construction, implementation of government policies on flood and sanitization of town/city planners. Increased awareness at all levels (community, local, state and federal) of the risk of flooding, appropriate response techniques in mitigating flooding via implementation of flood control policies and flood early warning system to control flooding in Nigeria were also recommended.
Keywords: Causative factors, Disaster, Environmental hazard, Flood, Preventive measures.