I guess we all have to start somewhere. Or restart.
I mean, we have been tackling this flood problem for what feels like a lifetime. And where are we now?
I’ll tell you where we are.
We are currently under the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. His father was president of the Philippines decades ago.
During that time, some people may insist it was blood and tears that flooded the road to our progress and development. Today, it’s a dank garbage soup flooding the streets when a little rain comes along.
Yet the amazingly quick rise of floodwaters on some Metro Manila streets after just minutes of a hard rain recently is a clear (or mud clear) reflection of our character as Filipinos, if not as human beings.
La Niña looms, the headlines say, and after months of intense heat, some might welcome the thought of rains. It’s not going to be your average rain, however, and it doesn’t have to take an expert to tell you that floods will be the next challenge.
It’s nothing new. Just like traffic, and corruption, we experience flooding year in and year out.
Climate change effects notwithstanding, floods have been the bane of our urban existence. Not even sturdy rain boots can allay the dangers of a deadly flooding in a world where leaders fail to take care of the problem. Quite spectacularly, too.
Let’s hear it from Marcos Jr. on the flood problem: “Integration” is the key word.
The marching orders, as reported by Public Works Secretary Manuel M. Bonoan after a meeting with Bongbong Marcos: “We have to integrate our flood control management programs with the other sectors so that the water that we manage in the flood control system does not go to the sea directly.”
I mean, the whole spiel simply unleashes a gush of muddy despair. First of all, whatever flood control management had been undertaken in the past was clearly incomplete or insufficient. And why is it hard to believe that never had “integration” been considered a solution in the past?
We have heard these platitudes before.
Leaders say all the right things. Marcos Sr. in the 1980s was all gung-ho about environmental preservation, saying even then how important it was for economic growth and sustainability.
Yet decades later, we have lost plenty of forest cover and indigenous communities have been displaced in favor of business interests.
So spare us the promises, please, and show us some real action.
This year, the DPWH says there is a flood control budget of “about P300 billion,” according to a broadsheet report.
President Marcos Jr. would like the agencies concerned to “come up with a water resource masterplan” as the country expects “above-normal rainfall” when La Niña hits.
That would be…when?
The plan is sound, and should have sparked a glimmer of hope. But maybe in some weeks, we will recall these glowing prospects as we try to wade and take shelter from gushing, shameful floodwaters carrying all the broken bits of promises we longed to believe.
