Abuja’s emergency management agency has urged residents living near water channels to consider relocating after overnight flooding submerged the ground floor of a residential building in the capital’s Mabushi District, destroying household belongings and prompting a 3am rescue operation.
The Federal Capital Territory Emergency Management Department said it received a distress call in the early hours of Friday after heavy rain caused both ground-floor flats at a one-storey building on Anthony Ikem Street, behind Blue Cabana Hotel, to fill with water up to window level. Search and rescue teams were deployed immediately, though responders faced an additional setback when the generator powering the pumping machine failed, forcing them to remove the water by hand. No lives were lost.
The flood destroyed furniture, food supplies and documents belonging to residents of the affected flats.
Abdulrahman Mohammed, the agency’s acting director-general, used the incident to issue a broader warning to Abuja residents living close to drainage channels and natural waterways, urging those in vulnerable areas to move before conditions deteriorate further. He also called for blocked drains to be cleared and for structures illegally built over water channels to be removed.
The appeal reflects mounting concern about Abuja’s readiness for what forecasters expect to be an intense rainy season. In recent years, parts of the capital have experienced recurrent flash flooding at the seasonal peak, a pattern that experts and officials attribute to a combination of blocked drainage infrastructure, rapid and poorly regulated urban expansion, and construction encroaching on natural water channels.
Those structural problems have proved stubbornly resistant to remedy. Despite repeated warnings from emergency agencies in previous years, low-lying communities across the FCT remain exposed, and the pace of development continues to outstrip the capacity of drainage systems designed for a much smaller city.
Friday’s incident, officials suggested, was less an isolated emergency than an early signal of what the coming months may bring.
