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Dredge Masters, the sanitation company desilting the Odaw River and the Korley lagoon, has called on authorities to put in strict measures to clear all human settlements along the drains.

According to Sena Adiepena, Operations Manager of the company, human activities along the river banks contribute to its rapid choking therefore causing floods and other disasters whenever it rains.

She explained that the waste created by those along the Odaw River bank washes away into the river, building up on the silt that unavoidably enters it and thus reduce the water carrying capacity of the drains.

The operations manager said their stay hindered the flow of work in desilting the basin and also exposed humans to all kinds of risk especially children, given that they have on a number of times found rotten bodies in the water.

The choked Odaw drain was found to have contributed largely to the flooding of parts of Accra, particularly the Kwame Nkrumah Circle area where the flood led to an explosion of a filling station, killing about 159 people, on June 3 2015.

Upon a tour on a normal day to the Odaw River basin and what should have been the Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project site, one would discover the kind of filth that would make any stomach churn.

Since that disaster, companies have been engaged by government to try freeing the river from filth which saw, Dredge Masters’ engagment in December 2015 to clean, dredge and improve the flow as well as the water carrying capacity of the Odaw channel and the Korle lagoon to end disasters in raining season.

Mr. Adiepena, however, told media on the site yesterday that their biggest challenge they face in their line of work was the plastic waste derived from human activities along the river banks.

He disclosed that their company has ended up dredging the Odaw channel three times because of the broad day emptying of waste into the river basin, delaying the handing over to government, hence their resolution to have them cleared.

Meanwhile he stated that handing over of the first phase of dredging to government would soon be done whiles they study the rate of siltation to determine how often the Odaw River should be dredged.

Journalists witnessed the volume of work sunk into desilting the Korley lagoon to send it back to its original form.

Mr. Wise Ameterpey, a consultant to Dredge Masters said it could take one year for work to complete.

Already he said about 30 percent of work has been achieved and they were poised to bring back life into the Korley Lagoon.