With the approach of each fall season, questions resurface about the completion of sanitation, reconciling the rains with this sixty-year-old city.
Brahim Ould Sidi, the owner of a shop in Souk El Mina in Nouakchott, has a date with financial losses every year, as a result of the rains that may cause his shop to close for days.
Ibrahim traverses polluted swamps to reach his shop, after the rains in Nouakchott on Monday, in a scene that limits the movement of customers due to the difficulty of reaching some shops.
He tells Sky News Arabia:
- “With the approaching fall season, torrents surrounded a number of shops and it was impossible to reach the store for 4 days, until the municipality intervened, which did not succeed in suctioning all the water, due to its mixing with waste and mud.”
- “I am now selling in difficult circumstances, where the air is polluted by swamps, and our suffering is exacerbated by the lack of shoppers.”
- “I hope the authorities will develop an urgent plan for us to reduce this problem, as we are fed up with it.”
- “I built a small dam of bricks in front of the store to drain the rain water, so that my goods would not be damaged again.”
transportation crisis
And after every rain, the Mauritanian capital experiences a transportation crisis that lasts for hours, thus imprinting resentment on the faces of public transportation users, like the young Zakaria Weld Alkho.
Zakaria told Sky News Arabia:
- “The difficulty of moving around after hours of rain is comparable to Nouakchott’s suffering from torrential rains.”
- “I arrive very late to my place of work, and the transportation owners raise the price of the transportation ticket from 100 to 200 ouguiyas (about $5), amid the complete absence of the concerned authorities.”
- “I wait for an hour among the swamps in search of a taxi that will take me to my destination, and when I get one, the owner takes advantage of the situation and raises the ticket price.”
- “Living with this situation has become difficult and unfair.”
On the other hand, Mouloud Ould Hemmat, a taxi driver, explains that “car owners are the most affected by the torrential rains.”
He told “Sky News Arabia”: “The soil of Nouakchott is mixed with mud and salt, and when it rains, it becomes dangerous for cars to pass in some places, because the water suction operations carried out by the authorities are limited only to high-end neighborhoods.”
He added that “the reason for raising the fare price is due to the pollution of the car with mud and salt, so that washing it at least once a day becomes compulsory.”
In his speech, he points out that drivers “pay fuel prices from transportation, and they can only bear the cost of washing the car by raising the fare.”
besieged families
The rain damage was not limited to merchants and transport only, as some neighborhoods swallowed its bitterness and trapped a number of families inside their homes, to resort to building a bridge of bricks to break the siege.
Houses besieged by floods suffer from the spread of mosquitoes and some other insects.
The continued suffering of Nouakchott with the rains is due to the absence of a rainwater drainage system that covers all parts of the city, in addition to the policy of sheltering the population and settling them in low areas that are uninhabitable and are always exposed to inundation and floods, according to the technical advisor to the Director General of the National Sanitation Office, Sayed Ahmed Bab Al-Hamad.
Bab Al-Hamad told Sky News Arabia:
- “There is a package of measures taken by the government in order to confront the threat of floods, represented in the formation of a ministerial supreme committee to deal with crises, in addition to sub-technical committees at the level of each state to follow up on the situation and early warning.”
- “The National Sanitation Office mobilizes all its means and mobilizes all its resources, with the support of the government, at the beginning of each rainy season, in anticipation of any emergency.”
- “At the level of Nouakchott, we prepare and clean the rainwater drainage network, and at the level of areas classified as more vulnerable to flooding, we send a number of tanks and pumps, and teams stationed during the season, similar to the cities of Rosso and Alak, in addition to Kaédi.”
- “Achieving an integrated sewage system in Nouakchott requires the mobilization of significant financial resources of about $400 million, and the subscription of international companies that have the expertise and technical capacity to carry out such projects.”
And with the first rains that Nouakchott witnessed during the current season, the Minister of Water and Sanitation, Ismail Ould Abdel Fattah, said that the rains “made it possible to identify the shortcomings and problems presented, in order to overcome them in the near future.”
The minister stated that “the sector will work to solve problems related to rainwater and preserve the health of citizens, by eliminating swamps completely and fighting mosquitoes,” stressing that “material and human means are available for that.”
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