Our house was beside a creek on Salallilia Street, which overflowed if it rained more than an hour or two. In really strong typhoons, the water would spill over and fill the adjoining streets. Everyone would have to move up to their second floors, if they had them. The water would reach waist deep and many houses bore the mark of the annual flood on their walls. I still remember the signature smell of damp wood and decomposing organic matter from the creek that would last till Christmas.
As kids, we enjoyed the floods. It was time for tasty treats – such as American canned goods. Spam, sardines, Hunt’s pork and beans (with real pork in it) were my favorites. It was also a time for champorado, that chocolatey rice porridge that kept us all warm in wet weather and went well with all sorts of dried fish (danggit), eggs and viands. It was a picnic every meal.
It was also a time – despite the danger of howling winds and rising waters – for family bonding. Everyone was trapped and so we played board games, listened to the radio (with the accompanying brownouts, TV was usually out) and generally made life miserable for the adults.
As kids in Project 4, we considered ourselves luckier than friends and relatives in other parts of the city. Our relations in San Juan, Sampaloc, Sta Ana and central Manila bore the brunt of often disastrous floodwaters. Some would see their houses disappear completely. Cars would float away and many lives were lost each season.
The rains also wrought havoc in the streets and so the thin asphalt they were usually paved with disappeared into moon craters. The whole metropolis was paralyzed and even Malacañang Palace was not spared until the mid-1960s.
Floods today wreak similar damage. It still rains about the same amount every year. The city has corrected some of its deficiencies, but flooding remains as perennial as the rains themselves. Extensive urbanization has also covered all open land in the city so flood waters have no way of percolating into the soil. Canals are clogged with garbage that builds up during the dry season and no one keeps them clean. Grills for this disappear with regularity and maintenance does not seem to be in the government’s vocabulary.
Year after year, we hear the same promises from politicians – that they would clear the esteros, that informal settlers would be re-housed, that drainage systems would be improved and that the flood problem of metro Manila would disappear within their term of office. Of course, no one believes them.
Floods have always been and will continue to be part of our way of life. Just like our unpayable national debts, unsolvable fiscal crises and depreciating peso. Billions have been spent from international sources, loans, war reparations and all manner of aid that usually disappears into corrupt pockets. The flood, it seems, is of all these billions pouring into bank accounts overseas.
My family moved to Baryo Kapitolyo in 1967. It was and still is high ground. My dad made sure that we moved to a place that would never flood. It never did flood in my village but today, the rest of the city has invaded our once exclusive subdivision, tricycles fill the streets with noise pollution 24 hours a day, commercial establishments line all the main roads and now traffic from EDSA has invaded a block away.
I still miss the floods and the Spam. I think I’ll go by a few cans now and a box of instant champorado. Typhoon season isn’t over.