SUSTAINABILITY

How to Prevent Flooding in home, Best Tips in Kenya

By Samuel | Published July 14, 2020 | 3 Comments

Are you searching for the best ways on how to prevent flooding in your home?

Floods cause huge losses in homes, farms, and ranches almost every year. This natural calamity destroys human life, property, crops, and animal yields. Though there are some positive impacts on farming like fishing and fertile soil deposits, the risk to vulnerable poor farmers and pastoralists is enormous. As water sweeps their crops and livestock away, it erodes their hope, efforts, and resilience for years.

This post proposes the 4 best flood protection methods for homes.

How to Prevent flooding in your home

How can you stop flood and stormwater from destroying your home or property? While there is no absolute means to stop floods from occurring, the following three methods help to manage the effects of floods destroying your home. Disaster management, Rainwater harvesting, erecting flood barriers, or making a raised floodproof house.

You can jump on a section to see

Flood Disaster Preparedness

Do you live in an area classified as flood prone? One way to reduce it effects on your home is to building you capacity in disaster preparedness and knowledge about floods. You will therefore know when to expect, prepare and respond to flood risks in the best way. Means of preparedness for home owners and authorities include; –

Access and use weather forecasting information to know when floods are likely to occur. Residents in Kenya can access free weather forecasts at no cost using the KAOP weather forecasting App. In case of sporadic rainfall, you can prepare by moving to higher grounds, unclogging drainage, arranging sand bags etc., before floods can occur

Watch out for flood warnings from the disaster management unit or meteorological department and the media. There three types of flood warnings

• Flood watch: Flooding is possible, beware and watch out
• Flood Warning: Flooding of homes, businesses and main roads expected, Act now
• Severe flood warning: Severe flooding expected, danger to life and property, Act now
• All clear: Flood waters are going down, check if its safe to return

The other flood risk preparedness measure is to train your personnel, residents and family members on what to do incase of floods occurring. How to deploy flood barriers and shields in case of floods and evacuation procedure incase of severe flood warning issues.

At policy level, the government and its agencies need to invest in monitoring floods, research, warning, awareness creation and evacuation protocols to minimize negative effects of floods during the heavy rainy season.

Install Temporary flood barriers and shields

Temporary flood barriers are portable and easy to deploy in minutes. They work on water contact as shown in the YouTube video on the best temporary flood barriers for homes. Amazon stocks various anti-flood products. You can compare and Shop them at end of this article. Some need only one emergency personnel to deploy.

The flood barriers for homes in this article are:

• Sandbags
• Flood barrier socks
• Flood blocks
• Door guards
• Water gates
• Water Inflated Property Protector

Make a anti-flood house

There are 2 permanent flood measures that are ideal for you if you live in a flood-prone region with a history of frequent occurrence, The methods you can use are investing in making flood-proof homes and making embankment

Are you looking for zero damage from floods to your home and property? You can make or buy a flood-resistant house.  You can choose a raised house or the floating type. These will allow water to pass under without destroying your furniture and other valuables.

• An Elevated house; is built as a raised house on strong poles or beams that allow water to pass under the raised platform just like a beach house. Besides, you can make a raised foundation made using compacted earth or concrete.
• Make an amphibious floating house; your house will rise with rising water floods from its foundations as with water level. Today, there are many innovative amphibious floodproof house prototypes for low-income and high-end regions. Examples are the buoyant home in Buckinghamshire along the River Thames in the UK. Another one in Bangladesh uses empty recycled water bottles. The idea is to go for a cheap solution you can afford given your budget.

Erect Permanent embankments

You will erect permanent barriers to divert water and protect your home, yard, and other property that you choose to contain within your flood barriers. They are constructed and expected to remain in place for many years. You can make them part of your architecture and landscaping designs for safety and beauty.

You can make permanent embankments using concrete, stone walls, compacted earth, etc. Others are dykes and embankments, constructing stone walls, and laying sandbags The main advantage of making permanent flood barriers is the little to nonhuman intervention needed to deploy, demount, and store, as well as the need for training personnel. But they are expensive, take time, and are labor intensive to set. This has led to innovation and the use of temporary barriers you can deploy in a minute in case of flash floods as discussed below.

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