The rains are back, and for many Filipinos the approaching wet season brings more than the threat of flooded streets and displaced families. It revives bitter memories of one of the most brazen corruption scandals — the flood control mess that implicated some of the highest officials in the land.
The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) officially declared the start of the southwest monsoon, or habagat, on Saturday, as severe tropical storm “Domeng” churned and intensified over the Philippine Sea.
As of yesterday, the storm was located 875 kilometers east of Northern Luzon, packing maximum sustained winds of 100 kilometers per hour (kph) and gusts of up to 125 kph.
PAGASA expects it to reach typhoon strength Sunday morning before exiting the Philippine Area of Responsibility on Monday.
The immediate concern is that “Domeng,” combined with the enhanced southwest monsoon, will drench Palawan, Occidental Mindoro and Antique, and threaten landslides and flooding in vulnerable communities.
Scattered rains and thunderstorms will lash the Bicol Region, Quezon, Samar, and parts of Northern Luzon, a wide arc that will test drainage systems and disaster response infrastructure.
It is precisely that infrastructure, or the criminal lack of it, that concerns the public this time of year.
The flood control scandal that erupted last year uncovered the theft of billions of pesos in public funds that should have gone to building infrastructure to protect Filipinos from the seasonal inundation.
The controversy drew in figures from the upper echelons of government, officials entrusted with the nation’s safety who, investigators alleged, treated public works budgets as their personal funds.
Drainage systems that had been supposedly built were found to be substandard or nonexistent. Communities that should have been protected flooded anyway.
And when the waters rose, it was the poorest Filipinos, those in low-lying areas with nowhere else to go who paid the price with their homes, their livelihoods, and sometimes their lives.
Poster boy
The timing could not be more appropriate. Just a day before PAGASA officially declared the onset of the southwest monsoon, the Sandiganbayan’s Second Division issued a warrant of arrest for Senator Jinggoy Estrada for a graft case related to the flood control mess.
Estrada posted bail of P90,000 at the Sandiganbayan on 29 May for graft charges linked to the multibillion-peso flood control scandal. It may be a brief reprieve as he also faces a plunder charge, a non-bailable offense, for allegedly pocketing P573 million in infrastructure project kickbacks.
He is thus far the highest ranking official arrested over the flood control corruption, and the third lawmaker to face charges after former Senator Bong Revilla and former Representative Zaldy Co.
The Office of the Ombudsman charged them after an investigation revealed an “intricate mechanism” allegedly involving illegal budget insertions and project allocations at the Department of Public Works and Highways in 2025, with funds “deliberately” funneled into specific infrastructure projects “in exchange for predetermined commission fees.”
Those same communities now brace themselves for the floods that will surely come.
The heat is still on
There is also a cruel irony in PAGASA’s additional warning, despite the incoming rains, that the heat index in some places are expected to reach a dangerous 44 degrees Celsius, including in Cavite City and Infanta, Quezon.
The country faces, simultaneously, too much water in some places and suffocating heat in others, a climate paradox that demands exactly the kind of competent, honest governance that the flood control scandal showed was so catastrophically absent.
The habagat does not care about court dates or political alliances. It arrives on its own schedule. And every year, it holds up a mirror to a nation still waiting for those who betrayed its trust to be held to account, finally.