Not a tale of two cities, but...

If we talk about the rain water that severely flooded Metro Cebu just few days ago, I remember a part of the opening chapter of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”. London and Paris. This literary piece is considered as one of the world’s top best-selling novels of all time. My only purpose in using this book’s title in this column today is to attract the attention of the city leadership to the physical condition of our city. There can be imaginable two tales of one Cebu City. The first is that it is less ideally habitable because it is damaged by frequent flooding and the second it being a future re-engineered metropolis.

To be relevant, let me express my most profound apologies to Dickens, as I will transpose two sentences of the opening paragraph of his work into “it was the winter of despair; it was the spring of hope.”

The first city. There were no storms that hit Cebu City last week. Only heavy rains. Yet, many of the streets became instant rivers of sort. We were terrified by the sight of floodwaters gushing where vehicular traffic was supposed to flow. Our houses were inundated. Our precious possessions damaged. Was not Dickens’s words “the winter of despair” what we Cebuanos felt?

Let us consider, in comparison, one terrifying scene. The PAGASA reported that the rain poured by Typhoon Tino on November 4, 2025 was abnormal. The volume of rain water that drenched our city in only about six hours was reportedly equivalent to 1 1/2 months of normal precipitation. The unprecedented damage that swept thru the villages in our city was thus explainable. But we knew that there was no Tino-like storm that fell on our island few days ago. There were only scattered thunderstorms. Still floods hit us enough for us to feel the despair the English novelist sighed about.

Are we getting unsafe from floods each time it rains? Or, to drive home a point, is ours not a tale of a city where its residents are troubled by frequent floodwaters caused seemingly even by ordinary downpours? Indeed, did Dickens unravel for us our winter of despair when floods hit us with hitherto unheard of frequency?

The second city. The incorrigible optimist in me says that our city leadership can take such horrible scenes of frequent flooding as, to quote Dickens again, a spring of hope. Why so? Mayor Nestor Archival is an engineer. He knows the topography of our city. He is aware that the noticeable problem is the constriction of our natural waterways. Big business, as well as informal settlers, have shamelessly (and yes, illegally) usurped huge portions of the banks of our rivers and creeks. Did we know, for example, that bancas, I mean those outrigger boats of olden times, could sail thru the Tinago River from the Mactan Channel all the way to where the Gaisano Main store is now? If our historians can verify this as a matter of fact to Hon. Archival then he will realize how the wide river had been constricted. The mayor then can find a foremost engineering solution to this nagging flooding problem. This Tinago example is only an initial view. Where mayors before him failed, Archival can, using legal authority, administrative power and political will, smash the structures that have diminished the width of the Guadalupe and Mahiga rivers and make these waterways as swimmable as the Seine River in Paris and River Thames in London. Let Mayor Archival be our spring of hope for a kind of second city.