The new normal

The planet is changing, and for all the talk about climate change, our responses indicate that we’re still in the denial stage.

After typhoon “Ondoy” struck two years ago, our office planned to buy flat-bottom boats to ferry our employees during heavy flooding.

We scouted around for good quality boats with roofs – the best ones are as expensive as cars. But our interest flagged as Ondoy’s torrential floods subsided and the idea of using a boat in the streets of Metro Manila seemed like a silly idea. The plan was completely forgotten by the time Christmas 2009 rolled around.

I remembered the boat plan again only when “Pedring” devastated western Metro Manila last month. The boat would’ve come in handy. I grew up in the city of Manila, and I have never seen anything like that flooding. Neither has my mother.

The crashing waves from Manila Bay were so powerful they destroyed the concrete seawall along Roxas Boulevard. The water rose nearly up to the windows of sport utility vehicles, with the water deepest between Quirino Avenue and T.M. Kalaw street. The combination of sea and rainwater flooded nearby streets all the way to Taft Avenue, where the water reached car floors.

I know this from pictures, and also because some of my colleagues either drove through the horrid flood (a RAV 4 survived; hats off to Toyota) or else left their cars near Ospital ng Maynila on Quirino Avenue and waded through the murky water, which was full of garbage, all the way to our office in Manila’s Port Area.

One of them asked me, after managing to scrounge up a fresh change of clothing, if that water had poop in it. I assured her that it most certainly did, from various creatures, as I also warned her of leptospirosis.

Some years ago after learning how to spell leptospirosis, and having a basic idea of what it was, I thought there weren’t too many new things left to learn about typhoons and floods.

But after Pedring, we all had to google “storm surge.” The term sounded lame for a headline. It didn’t seem to capture the drama of waves 20 feet high buffeting the coconut trees, poolside and lower level Spiral restaurant of Sofitel Philippine Plaza, and engulfing Roxas Boulevard. The flooding was so bad our photographers needed a boat (but couldn’t get one) to reach the Sofitel.

Farther north, in the Malabon-Navotas-Valenzuela area, the storm surge combined with a high tide caused one of the worst floods ever experienced by residents who are used to flooding.

Equally strange, for someone born and bred in the city of Manila like me, I avoided the flood on my way to the office by passing through areas that used to be the most flood-prone: the SLEX and Osmeña Highway, Nagtahan and Legarda, C.M. Recto and then Manila’s Chinatown. The usually flood-prone part of Port Area where our office is located was also flood-free.

A foreigner told me that a storm surge — although much more powerful than the one in Manila Bay — was what New Orleans experienced during hurricane Katrina.

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History books show that Manila and neighboring areas that now constitute northwestern Metro Manila have suffered floods even during the Spanish colonial period.

Geologists tell us that the city of Manila is gradually sinking into the sea, so flooding is inevitable. Over in Bulacan and Pampanga, marshlands and big rivers have long made large tracts of the two provinces vulnerable to torrential flooding.

A foreigner who has lived in the country for decades told me that in the 1970s, he saw Pangasinan and neighboring areas inundated by flooding as massive as the one that hit the province during typhoon Ondoy.

Despite those experiences, and numerous warnings from different sources about the risks posed by climate change, we haven’t really crafted a long-term response to the threat.

The Dutch, for example, built over several centuries a system of dikes and polders or reclaimed land that were kept dry by canals and water pumps. Some of those pretty windmills that we have long associated with the Dutch landscape kept the pumps running, pushing back water from the North Sea, until wind was replaced by diesel and electricity. Today the country has about 3,000 polders, with Amsterdam’s busy Schiphol International Airport sitting on reclaimed land.

In our country, what we’ve seen so far are mostly stopgap measures and ad hoc responses to natural calamities. After Ondoy and Pepeng, we panicked a bit, and then simmered down, feeling a bit sheepish about our panic.

As floods subsided and the weather stabilized into normal-strength typhoons and monsoons, we told ourselves that the planet was back to normal.

Pedring, and the protracted flooding in Central Luzon, showed that it’s not. And we weren’t prepared for the disaster.

We have to confront the possibility that we will increasingly see more of such natural calamities. Weather forecasters are warning of more heavy rains until February next year.

This is the new normal. We have to get used to it, and develop innovative ways of adapting to it.