Recent deadly urban flash flooding in Baku fits in a pattern of such events in the past 10 years or so. Unfortunately, this year’s flooding cost 2 lives. Most websites (e.g. this one) and interviews (e.g. this one with the mayor of Baku Mr. Eldar Azizov) blame the aging Soviet infrastructure or the lack of new drainage systems when developing new areas for new residential areas. This raises many questions. What is “development” of land? Who is “developing” land and to what extent is there coordination between real estate development, government agencies that are responsible for controls, checks and monitoring?
It’s not really a matter of infrastructure, as the “old pipelines” narrative may present it. It’s a matter of poor planning and no integration of water, land, construction systems and urban planning. And one more thing — the developed world is slowly but surely changing its approach from a purely “piped” drainage to Sustainable urban Drainage Systems (SUDS). This means more green spaces in cities, more permeable surfaces (not asphalt of marble), more retention ponds, but also more preparedness to react, early warnings for citizens and citizen awareness about the risks. It’s not easy to do innovation, and planning issues (human affairs) are harder than dealing with pipes or pumps. I wrote an article about such challenges in Leicester, England a few years ago. Perhaps this may be of interest to those who want to improve the situation in Baku. Here is a quote from that article on what a SuDS approach to flood risk management is.
A SuDS (sustainable drainage systems) mimics natural drainage, having some storage capacity, slowing the movement of water and achieving a reduction in volume leaving the site during a storm. The key difference between this and conventional piped drainage is that there is no one standard technique to be used universally. SuDS may take more time in the initial design but if thought through at the outset then there can be savings both in construction and longer-term maintenance. The term SuDS is a general term made up of the use of a variety of techniques – either independently or as a collection of differing and complementary measures. (LCC, Citation2015a, p. 4)
Read a short synopsis and the link to the article here.
Below are some pictures that I took near Metropark, Narimanov metro station, Baku in September 2014. It rains in the fall, and the situation of overwhelmed highway drainage is not new. Let’s hope that there will be some immediate measures, followed by a more foundational change in planning and management systems of water/land use in Baku. The new plans of the government (Azerbaijan State Water Resources Agency) make me hopeful. But it’s not just about building pipes or separating rainwater drainage from wastewater drainage. It’s also about innovating social and management systems to make them water and panning organisations into learning organisations — and that’s what I and colleagues describe in the article.
