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For years, villagers who lived near the Alau dam in northeastern Nigeria had told government officials that the structure was broken and the reservoir behind it too full.
But in early September, after heavy rains, a half-dozen officials stood overlooking the brimming reservoir, their feet squelching in the mud as they tried to reassure Nigerians that the dam was in good condition.
“The dam is not broken,” Alhaji Bukar Tijani, the government official leading the delegation, said that day. “People should not be afraid.”
Four days later, water ripped through the Alau dam wall, leaving two-thirds of the city of Maiduguri underwater, killing up to 1,000 people, said rescue and security workers, and displacing nearly half a million.
After the disaster, government officials blamed God, climate change and the poorest people of Maiduguri, who they said had put themselves in harm’s way by living in cheap homes along the Ngadda River.
But in fact, government agencies knew the dam was badly damaged and did not fix it or correct operational mistakes despite repeated warnings, both from local residents and from engineers who spent six years studying the dam.
Eight months before the dam collapsed, one of the engineers, Mala Gutti, warned dam officials that the structure was under intense hydraulic pressure and at risk of “catastrophic failure.”
The officials replied that they already knew of the problem and were taking action, Mr. Gutti said in an interview. The Nigerian media found budget lines showing that money had been repeatedly allocated for rehabilitating the dam. But locals said nothing had been done to either fix it or reduce the pressure it was under.
“They are really incompetent, I’m sorry to say,” said Mr. Gutti, who carried out the research with colleagues at the University of Maiduguri. “They don’t know what they are doing.”
The government’s failure to prevent the Alau dam disaster has raised concerns about more than 300 other dams “in dire need of maintenance” in Nigeria, according to Connected Development, a local nongovernmental organization.
Even the local authorities said Maiduguri should serve as a warning: “Other people should learn from Alau dam,” said Alkali Lawan, an official with the ministry of water resources in Borno State, of which Maiduguri is the capital. “It’s a very big disaster.”
Don’t Panic
It rained hard in northeastern Nigeria in August. But because the government said there was no danger, many residents did not move. Many lived downstream of the dam in Maiduguri, an ancient center of learning battered in recent years by violence from insurgents with the extremist group Boko Haram.
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The map locates the city of Maiduguri, in Borno state, in northeastern Nigeria. It also locates the Ngadda River, and the Alau dam southeast of Maiduguri.
NIGER
Maiduguri
BORNO
NIGERIA
Lagos
A3
Maiduguri
Alau
dam
Gulf of Guinea
A4
Ngadda R.
20o mileS
1o mileS
<
