The title of this article today is never intended to inflate the ego of Her Honor, Cebu Provincial Governor Gwendolyn F. Garcia. We read about her earlier resort to this word. She was reported to have used 'bayot' to describe our mayor in her word war with the latter. She might think that my adopting a corrupted word is some kind of an endorsement of her language. No, I don't think she needs sycophants, that I am not.
Neither should this title be taken as a dig at His Honor Cebu City Mayor Tomas R. Osmeña. I don't have to state the obvious. Winning by intimidation, a treatise written decades ago, is his apparent bible which, I observe, he practices rather forcefully. Thus, we all know or led to believe what happens to those who incur his ire. They are either unceremoniously banished to Timbuktu, if party mates, or made objects of incessant verbal abuse, if aligned with the opposition.
I use the word "binayot" to modify the indefinite, unspecified and haphazard approach our government assumes in looking at the perennial problem called flash city floods. Without meaning to insult the third sex, to do binayot is to be wishy-washy. To be sure, the city appears never to have adopted a coherent and lasting solution to address, once and for all, flooding of city streets.
There was a brief (because it did no last more than one hour) but heavy (for it really poured) rain the other day. In my youth, that thunderstorm kind of weather was called chubasco without my knowing what it really meant and why was it so labeled. Few minutes into the chubasco, I already imagined the ordeal some sectors of our city would suffer. Indeed, there were city streets that were eventually flooded. Yesterday's papers showed, rather candidly, a lady wading thru knee-high waters in a low-lying part of the city.
If the rain was prolonged like it was generated by an in-coming typhoon, I could understand the eventual flooding. Fortuitous events like floods, being unforeseen or if foreseen, being inevitable, no one, the city government included, could be held responsible. We just had to accept them and learn how to live along.
Flash floods, whatever this term means, occurring in our city may however, be explained. Here is a short list of factors contributing to, of course, flash floods. Flooding takes place because there are few open spaces to absorb the perceptively increasing density of rains. Residential, commercial and industrial buildings have sprouted. They are built on former open spaces. Where, in times past, rainwater would just be absorbed where it fell, presently, it has to be drained into existing canals.
Many canals or parts of our sewer system, built years ago, are of small sizes. Surely, when they were constructed, they were sufficient to take the volume of waters channeled in their direction. What sizes could suffice then are plausibly inadequate now.
Then, our riverbeds are heavily silted. Our callous practice of throwing just about anything to the river, pretending it to be a huge garbage container, is the main culprit. In addition, they have been severely constricted. I refer to the intrusion of hundreds of stilted homes of many informal settlers.
I am sure our officials are aware of these and other contributors to flash floods. They should know why we continue to have inundated areas whenever rain, no matter how briefly, falls. If we were to go by the elementary principle that we have to know what the problem is to be able to solve it, then we should have long spared our residents the trauma, nay the damage, brought about by flash floods.
The fact that I could not fully decipher what is being done to solve this problem makes me think that our city officials are wishy-washy in their efforts and thus are simply engaged in "binayot".
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Email: avenpiramide@yahoo.com.ph