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By Philip Ezuma, Port Harcourt
National Emergency Management Agency NEMA, has affirmed that the flood incident in the states of Rivers and Bayelsa has been minimal.
The Head of Operations, Port Harcourt office, National Emergency Management Agency NEMA, Mr Eric I. Ebhodaghe made the declaration, in Port Harcourt, at the weekend, during its two-day ‘Customer Service week 2025’, in response to the rain fall prediction by NAIMET, and the agency’s preparedness.
“We have been building mitigation measures yearly. We have never had a devastating flood incident, as the one of 2012, till date because of most of the mitigation measures. We have continued to build capacities, which have been helpful to ensure that we reduce the impact of flooding”, he explained.
The Head of Operations, NEMA, Port Harcourt office, noted that, when NIMET made the prediction, they moved into action, held collaborative and coordinating meetings with the stakeholders, including the state, where they rolled out measures, things needed to do, before, during and after the flooding.
According to NEMA boss in Port Harcourt, those things helped reasonably, hence the impact level is warning.
In his words, “we have not had occasion of severity, because a lot of preventive measures were taken, in time to ensure reduction of the impact.”
“We support states, LGAs, to identify the various forms of hazards and do ‘risk assessment’ of the disaster, to know how vulnerable they are, to these hazards and to be able to put mittigational measures via structural and non-structural mittigational measures, collaboratively in place, to ensure that we minimize their threat to such hazards”, he narrated.
He vouched that NEMA has been involved in a lot of operations such as search as search and rescues, swift response, rapid response per adventure there be incidents.
They have also assisted many stakeholders to ensure that they respond swiftly to such particular incidents – road crash, fire incident, flash flood incident, among others.
“We have also been involved in capacity building, which has helped us strengthen work synergy and put our critical stakeholders in the know-how and better readiness for responding to particular emergency situations”, he added.
