Abstract

In Cameroonian cities, floods from solid pollutant barriers constitute environmental hazards of new distinct dimension, nature and characteristics. This study examines geographical settings provoking floods in cities and the way it affects the population. It suggests appropriate policy mitigation options. Primary and secondary data collected through fieldwork and documentary sources were treated. Findings show that national and local rules and legislation are weakly applied exposing urban natural floodway to varied forms of human colonisation activities. These urban stream flood ways that ought to be downstream water evacuation role players reversed into inhabited neighbourhoods of diverted water. Human activities and infrastructural urban inputs that unconsciously imposed directional dictates unto urban stream flow have become self-made victims of wicked egocentrism over urban stream channels. As nature is permanently in a state of dynamic re-equilibration the urban stream waters have in retaliation taught its trouble givers a disproportionately unequal negative response in enormous fatalities for the humans who dare to resist its floods and abandonment for those who have been repeatedly humbled by its floods. The response from this no man’s land of aborted human conquest requires comprehensive and multidimensional environmental management in stream-bordered urban built.

Highlights

  • When discharge exceeds stream channel capacity to contain water the obvious is flood

  • The Kumba Water (Kumba River) cuts across this plain unleashing floods wherever its channel has been clandestinely tampered like Malabo and Nsieh quarters after the confluence of tributary streams like Mambungise, Mbanga Water or Bombele and Fiseme Water extended to Apostolic Church Quarter, New Quarters, SONAC

  • Kumba River and its tributaries sourcing from the forest harbouring Lake Barombi—Mbo (Figure 1) drain

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Summary

Introduction

When discharge exceeds stream channel capacity to contain water the obvious is flood. Such floods result from high precipitation as well as barrier effect due to channel sediments or solid waste. Floods present environmental and social consequences in urban areas through economic loss, misery and deaths in direct function of population density and crowdedness of human activities on flood plains and contamination (Fogwe & Fombutio, 2010). Human activities and colonisation of flood plains increase both flood severity and frequency (Fogwe & Lambi, 2001; Dias, 2013) and cognisant of the fact that these areas are increasingly vegetable cultivation (Nkwenmoh, 2015) it remarked that since the start of the 21st century rainy season floods gravely affect urban tropical urban centres. In Cameroon, such phenomenon is widely reported in recent urban hazard studies for coastal towns like

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