Loose urban planning is one culprit

Senator Miriam Santiago, MMDA's Bayani Fernando, and GMA spokesman Cerge Remonde lamented that poor urban planning bred the havoc by typhoons "Ondoy" and "Pepeng".

All know how the once pristine high-grounds have been raped in the lame excuse for "progress." The devastations as Exhibits "A" to "Z", in the NCR inundated by "Ondoy" and northern Luzon deluged by almost stationary tormentor "Pepeng", are grimly graphic.

Just cast your eyes westward to the once inaccessible mountains and hills of Talamban, Busay, and Babag, down south to the slopes of Bulacao and Tabunok. The sight that meets the eye is the faraway scenic diorama of ribbon-like roads. And scattered like cloth sequins are vari-colored posh dwellings, the virtual citadels of the very rich and the nouveau riche.

The proliferation of housing projects have destroyed the high grounds with bulldozers leveling slopes, cutting mountainsides, excavating the earth's bowels, and uprooting trees, bushes, and whatever flora. And over-quarrying for commercial purposes completes the death of Nature.

With the rains, almost nothing sinks by seepage or absorption, as rains just cascade down. Loose soil and cracked surface slalom in landslides and rampaging flashfloods that inundate the plains. Minutes of rain in Cebu City's mountains are enough to drain and drown the city proper downside.

Urban Cebu City and Mandaue City, and along their principal waterways, as the Guadalupe-Pahina River and Butuanon River, are teeming with squatters on both riverbanks. Esteros and creeks are choked waterways resulting in spillage. Squatters have multiplied because of politics and lack of political will by the officialdom.

It's true that LGUs have their own zoning/planning units to comply with urban planning ordinances patterned after a national law as administered by a national agency; and, that the environmental clearance certificate issued by the DENR in ecological or environmental projects, is often mere formality in granting.

It's also a matter of course that applications for "variance" from the approved land use of the LGUs is liberally treated, such that, land use classification has become a sickening joke; and that, the term "variance" which is basically a nuanced exception, has become the undiscriminating rule.

Also strangely, the government regulatory measures have unfortunately not hectored the role of geology - as the science of the earth's crust, rocks, and fossils underground - in urban planning and development. Thus, whether the site is landslide-prone underneath, or along a tremor belt, or whether the soil is porous, or of limestone, or loose and cracky stone, and not of solid rocks, etc. are often ignored in urban planning.

Witness the criminal anomaly of putting up housing settlements in the watersheds abutting Laguna de Bay, polluting its once clean water with the urban and suburban communities comprising the NCR whose daily tons of solid waste and toxic water make the lake a giant cistern. To top it all, there's that San Pedro, Laguna subdivision of dwellings wallowing in streets/canals outpacing the waterways of Venice. What a shame!

When natural catastrophes like "Ondoy", or the Guinsaugon tremor that totaled the whole barrio, or the "Pepeng" massive landslides in Benguet and the other Northern Luzon slopes, canyons, and ravines, and even that in Marikina catch basin, etc., t'was too late to save lives.