How to prevent flood disasters

It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark. —Howard Ruff

By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail. —Ben Franklin

Three things it is best to avoid: a strange dog, a flood, and a man who thinks he is wise. —Welsh proverb

Just a few weeks before the devastating onslaughts of typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng (thank goodness, the old and seemingly chauvinistic way of giving typhoons only female names has given way to gender equality!), was a luncheon I can’t forget hosted by Cebu Pacific Air boss Lance Y. Gokongwei for World Wildlife Fund Philippines officials, led by CEO Jose Ma. Lorenzo “Lorie” Tan at the Crowne Plaza Hotel’s Xintiandi Chinese restaurant. Cebu Pacific Air and WWF are partnering on an environmental project.

I can’t forget Lorie Tan’s dire predictions that unmitigated climate change would someday threaten many urban centers of Metro Manila and other Philippine coastal or riverside areas with horrific floods, if measures and preparations were not made. Wow!

The recent flood disasters also reminded me of the pragmatic speech Senator Loren Legarda gave at the United Nations’ Regional Champion for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation for the Asia-Pacific, an international conference held from April 22 to 24 in Beijing. Why have the government and other politicians not heeded her warnings and proposals?

A future of increasing floods due to worsening climate change and wanton environmental degradation is happening now, but it is not yet too late for the Philippines, and I strongly believe we should learn lessons from these disasters and take proactive initiatives such as the following:

• Dredge and clean waterways. Go beyond lip service and cosmetic changes, but decisively undertake the massive cleanup and dredging of all rivers, esteros, canals, drainage, sewage and other water systems throughout Metro Manila and in all urban centers of the Philippines. Declare martial law on this if necessary and physically demolish any illegal structures, polluting factories or squatter shanties on, beside or in any waterway!

• Create more parks in cities. Free up huge tracts of land in our cities for the creation of more greenery and parks, not only for aesthetics, recreation or fresh air, but also to act as catch basins or help absorb our cities’ floodwaters. In our mostly ill-planned steel-and-concrete cities, there seem to be fewer and fewer places that can absorb huge avalanches of rainwater into the earth.

• Decongest urban centers. Re-plan and decongest certain areas of our major cities away from flood-prone and low-lying areas, which can cause fatal catastrophes during severe typhoons. The urgent priority should be relocating overcrowded squatter colonies away from danger. If these squatter communities resist, use the full force of the law and iron political will to decongest our cities — no ifs, ands or buts!

• Always be prepared! Adopt a national policy of constant readiness and prevention, instead of the government getting caught so shockingly flatfooted with only a few rubber boats to respond to major emergencies and crises such as the recent floods. We’ve had floods in the Philippines for ages — ever since the era of the Spanish colonizers and maybe even before — so how come the government had only a handful of rubber boats for rescues and seemingly no real contingencies for flood disasters?

There are usually an estimated 22 typhoons passing over the Philippines every year, nine of which will make landfall and five of which will be destructive. What about shipwrecks, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions? Are we as a society, and is the government, as our primary protector, prepared? Remember the old Boy Scout and Girl Scout motto: “Be prepared.”

• Improve flood control. Deploy engineers and technocrats to study, reform and propose drastic remedies for the age-old flood-control programs of government, which have for decades failed so miserably. Consult the best engineers and even international consultants (perhaps the Dutch, who are flood experts), but do not allow lawyers and politicians to come up with inane or politically convoluted solutions.

• Re-plan and rebuild infrastructure. Rethink and, if needed, rebuild the infrastructure systems of our cities to adjust to flood-prone areas. These new systems should prevent the bottling up of huge volumes of floodwater and instead facilitate easy flow. I recently saw on TV how Malaysia has designed their highways or underground infrastructure — they have features below street level for allowing floods or rainwater to flow fast or subside quickly.

If there’s any bellyaching about the gargantuan costs of digging up and rebuilding our highways, whether EDSA, Gil Puyat (Buendia), Taft Avenue, Marcos Highway, or any other basic infrastructures to flood-proof them, please remind all the critics that in 2006 alone, disasters had a total negative impact on the Philippine economy of P20 billion or four percent of our gross domestic product, not counting the social, emotional and other human costs. What about Ondoy, Pepeng and other calamities this year — how much are our economic and other losses? Let us change and rebuild basic infrastructures to be flood-proof and flood-ready!

• Lessen corruption for better flood control and infrastructure. Punish excessive corruption, which causes substandard or failed flood-control projects and lousy infrastructure.

• Teach all kids how to swim. Teach all students starting at elementary levels — whether public or private schools — the basics of swimming. The Philippines is an archipelagic country with about 7,107 islands, but it is sad that the educational system has not properly trained kids nationwide to learn the all-important sport of swimming. Why devote most of our society’s scarce resources to un-winnable and globally uncompetitive basketball? Why not teach the lifesaving skill of swimming (plus the world’s most popular spectator sport of football/soccer)? If more people could swim, I believe many deaths could have been prevented during the super-typhoons. 

• Plant trees and reforest. Instead of teaching school kids what I believe to be useless citizens’ military training exercises, mandate that all students at every level should plant trees on every available sidewalk, at the center islands of thoroughfares, vacant lots and other places. Deploy the military forces and other people to rural areas near our cities for massive reforestation projects to reverse over a century of logging without replanting. Logging per se is not nefarious or bad, because it is like mining in the extraction of natural resources. But unlike mining or oil drilling, the resources of which will forever be gone and totally depleted, logging of the forests can and should be followed strictly by replanting and reforestation. Plant more trees; revive the lost forests!

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