"The situation that hit us here is beyond sandbags"
Water extreme events in Southeast Ghana 2023-2025
Context
Climate crisis, when locally assuming disastrous dimensions, is closely bonded to water: too much (floods and inundations), too little (droughts), too polluted. Water extreme events occur all over the planet, they affect humans and other-than-humans alike.
Our documentation “The situation that hit us here is beyond sandbags” zooms in on three such occurrences which took place in the Volta Region in Southeast Ghana between 2023 and 2025: in the town of Mepe, in Agbozume in the Ketu Municipal District, and in Agavedzi, a coast hamlet in the same municipality.
We have interviewed people there, driven by their wish to give testimony of what happened and by our interest in the individual and collective coping strategies of the affected communities. The interviews, along with additional film footage and other picture material, are in this documentation prepared for exploring, preserving and learning.
About us
Giulia Fanton
a cultural anthropologist working for the LVR, a regional council in the Rhineland in Germany. In 2021 -2023, Giulia co-authored the blueprint for this online resource: an exhibition including digital documentary of oral history of a flash flood in Western Germany entitled “So was haben wir noch nicht erlebt” (We haven‘t seen anything like this before). The digital online documentation was exhibited in various West-European institutions.
Bruno Arich-Gerz
works in several projects that focus on water (extremes) and language. BRIDGE is one of them: Building Resilient Communities through Integrating Climate Adaptation with Sustainable Development Goals in the University Education and Learning. BRIDGE is co-conducted by researchers from RWTH Aachen University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana.
BRIDGE
BRIDGE is funded by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and directed by Rudith S. King and Divine K. Ahadzie, Heribert Nacken along with Florian Balmes and Richard Gramlich. It has lead to a sequel: Critical Water(s), a symposium hosted by Volkswagen Foundation in Hanover in 2024. We were – and still are – indebted to both BRIDGE and the symposium as we benefit from both funding institution for “The situation that hit us here is beyond sandbags”
Making-of
In March 2025, we conducted interviews with around two dozen affected residents from each of the three communities.
The interviews were semi-structured and mostly in English. We are grateful to Rudith S. King for interpreting from Ewe into English whenever words came more naturally to the informants in their native language.
Apart from the interviews, we collected private photographs, clips, damage charts, and public media footage. In a short film
we link the Ghanaian floods with the 2021 disaster in Euskirchen, Germany.
One of the German flood survivors, Karl Kreuzberg, joined the fieldwork, facilitating dialogue between flood-affected people from both countries.
This exchange may mark the beginning of deeper cooperation.