Bridges

San Mateo people are stuck in San Mateo, I am told. I go, “What? Why?”

It had been raining intermittently where I live since Sunday evening, on a day when dark clouds had us hurrying back to our homes, expecting a deluge, which never came.

Not where we live, that is. By Monday evening, however, in those parts of Metro Manila that had been warned of “Yellow Rainfall,” cars were quickly submerged and homes were flooded out. And people in San Mateo could not go anywhere because, as I was told, the only bridge out of it had been submerged as well.

Baffled could not begin to describe my reaction. First of all, do those color-coded rainfall warnings really mean something to ordinary folks? Does intense or torrential mean the same for us all, or does the weather bureau need to make even better descriptions that everyone can visualize? And secondly, if true, why would San Mateo have only one way out of it?

These were questions running in my mind while thinking of the miserable circumstances typhoon “Enteng” had wrought upon many of our kababayan anew. Tough if you have to take Taft, and not even humming the tune “Raining in España” can placate motorists and commuters who need to get to work no matter what.

“Carina” is barely a distant memory, and here we are again contending with murky floodwaters after what seems like just minutes of rain. Out come the umbrellas, but no one is getting the boot.

What also boggles the mind is that everyone receives early warnings of impending tropical storms from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, yet still people get caught in their midst, paralyzed into further inaction.

Is it really as bad as that? Do we imagine how fast the rains can cause floods, and do we still wonder why this is so? The answer is yes, it has been quite bad for years now.

As of this writing, at least 11 have perished from “Enteng,” mostly in Rizal province where landslides killed “two schoolboys and a 27-year-old pregnant woman.” So the area has been established as prone to landslides. Residents there have been “encouraged” to leave and move elsewhere, “with offers of housing in other locations,” an online report goes.

Still they stay, and still we wait — people living in a country visited by over 20 typhoons a year — for disaster to strike.

What is not crossing the communication highway in this scenario? What other bridges will burn or get submerged in floods so high we can’t remember why nobody tried to build other ways out of such a helpless situation?