Use of possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns

It was in the news last week that a privately owned dam in Solai, Nakuru County, burst and destroyed villages along an estimated 5km stretch that, unfortunately, lay in the path that the water, having escaped restraining walls, created. The devastation was horrendous to say the least, especially considering that the calamity happened at night and, as fate would have it, power supply was cut off.

Media accounts reported variously that ‘Solai dam in Nakuru bursts its banks’, ‘Solai dam bursts’ and ‘Solai Patel dam breaks its walls’. Besides agreement on the number of the dead, what was destroyed and the usual recriminations following such disasters, two things stand out from the construction of the sentences.