Global warming floods Metro Manila!

For tonight’s show on Straight from the Sky, we bring you a success story of a Cebuano whom I knew a long time ago when his family operated Woodwares International at a time when exporting furniture was only reserved for a few. He was the senior partner of a Malaysian consortium that built the Waterfront Hotel in Lahug and Mactan. He suddenly got out of this consortium and entered into a partnership with the Swire Group for the Cebu Pacific Airline Catering at the Mactan Export Processing Zone Authority (MEPZ). Then, he went back to the hotel business and started the Hilton Resort & Spa.

Our special guest is no other than Mr. Manny Osmeña a.k.a. Manny O! No doubt the hotel business would have kept him busy. Yet Manny recently entered the world of wines… something very unexpected, after all, we don’t have vineyards or wineries here. But somehow he was able to get a winery to market his wines dubbed “Manny O,” which makes him one of Cebu’s most interesting, versatile and successful businessmen. So watch this very interesting show on SkyCable’s channel 15 at 8:00pm taped at the Hilton Resort.

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Everyone’s talking about the great flood that befell upon the National Capital Region last Saturday during which Metro Manila had flood in places that never got flooded before. Tropical Storm “Ketsana” or its Philippine name “Ondoy” was only tagged as a Tropical Depression last Friday, but it turned out to be one of the worst typhoons that hit Metro Manila.

It wasn’t the strongest typhoon that struck Luzon, but it was a typhoon that brought record (a month’s worth of rainfall in just 6-hours) rains to Metro Manila. There is no question that the record volume of rainfall is a direct result of global warming. Just when we thought that global warming was affecting only the North and South Poles, now it has directly affected us.

My sister Adela Kono was stuck at the Manila Pavilion with her husband Yuki because the water in the streets around the hotel was waist-deep. That means, the Luneta must have been flooded, including the Rizal Monument. She was supposed to speak before a Disability Conference in Marikina, well; this was all but cancelled because Marikina was hardest hit in Metro Manila.

My brother, Archt. Bing’s son-in-law Geo Tan and his mom Pilar, had to sleep in their van somewhere in Ongpin from 5:00pm to 7:00am because all the hotels in the vicinity were fully-booked and the restaurants shut down. Indeed, it was a disaster that no one expected.

If you want to know where all the rains came from, it came from the melting ice caps. Water never escapes our atmosphere, hence when it melts, it evaporates and circles the globe heavy inside the clouds and turns to rain. Watch former Vice-President Al Gore’s award-winning “The Inconvenient Truth” in order to fully understand why we are getting record floods and rains, which is happening not only here, but also in many other places like the flood disaster that struck Taiwan a couple of months ago.

But global warming can’t be blamed for the sinking of Metro Manila. The Philippine Constitution allows Filipinos to move freely from Province to Province, city to city, regardless of whether those urban centers can take on more people or not. This is why all our urban centers where jobs are most available are clogged with squatter colonies. Thanks to our kind of politics and ugly politicians that do not possess any political will. They use these squatters or the “masa” that lives in these colonies for their election strategy.

In the United States, most towns or cities always declare the number of people living there because people just cannot move to a city or county as they please. Perhaps it is time to look into this problem very carefully. If we build a house good for six people, then six can live in that house comfortably. But when you cramp fifteen people in the same house, it takes its toll in the water and sewage system because the house was not designed to take in more people. This is exactly what is happening in our Metropolitan areas.

But the main culprit is as what we said, global warming. We’ve already seen Al Gore’s documentary on this, yet we failed to heed his warnings to prepare for a cataclysmic event like Bagyong “Ondoy.” Take the case of the Pasig River, this should have been unclogged long ago, but it is only now that they are starting to dredge it… but then Bagyong Ondoy came too soon.

But how do you solve a problem like Metro Manila that is cramped with more than 12 million people? Off-hand, the solution we see is to create more centers of power, built brand new communities that are well-designed and its population controlled to make these communities livable. But this is the long-term solution; the short-term right now is to bring food and medicines to the people that need it most. We in Cebu should respond to this call.

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