By Hassan I. Conteh

This place, so crooked, is where women, young men and boys and girls converge in the morning hours to get water from some broken and old rubber pipes.

It is also the case for Fourah Bay Road residents in the east of Freetown during the month of March when women would have to struggle a lot to get access to water.

They would bend down the gutters holding up the rubber pipes containing water pumped from the Guma Valley dam.

Guma valley is a dam area where residents of Freetown including those at Fourah Bay are getting their drinking water from.

But the dam is gradually emptying with water of late due to the dry spells in the country’s weather pattern.

Last year, authorities at the Guma Valley dam, had in early October expressed deep worries saying that the capital may quickly starve of water supply.

They meant that the dam hadn’t enough water spilling over since rains didn’t come so heavily throughout the six month periods of the wet season ( May-October) in 2023.

The little amount of rainfall coming in 2023 clearly showed signs of severe climate change occurrences in the country.

As such, the natural dam which sits on top of the peninsula in the west of Freetown could not supply the overpopulated number of Freetown’s residents.

Already, the effects of the Guma dam drain have showed on those people at Fourah Bay Road and in other places in the heart of the city. Elk Street and Annie Walsh corner are examples of the places we had seen a stark picture of people struggling to get clean water in the middle of the dry season this year.

We, on Thursday March 14, 2024, saw groups of women, girls and young men putting on the ground some jerry cans (five gallons rubbers) close to a Guma Valley rubber pipe.

A man was collecting some token from those fetching water along Annie Walsh school corner in central Freetown.

Since government hasn’t any influence on controlling the patterns of rainwater coming from the sky, government, however; needs to do the needful by stopping people from cutting down the young trees and by stopping the squatting of the peninsula environs.

Speaking on the dam’s low spillage, managing director of Guma Valley Water Company, the state-owned agency, posted on twitter (now X) in October 2023.

“Early stoppage of spillage at the Guma dam is happening as a result of human activities around the Guma dam,” he said.

The effects, of people chopping down the thick and young forests of the peninsula and the forests on Mount Sugar Loaf in the city, will continue to pose severe situations for those living below the mountains’ belt in Sierra Leone’s capital Freetown.