EDITORIAL - Hopes for Noah hopefully not jinxed by Risa

President Aquino launched last Friday the Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards, or Project Noah. This is a multi-agency project that aims to step up disaster risk reduction and management by allowing better public understanding of factors pertaining to the weather.

Right now, Project Noah can allow communities a lead time of six hours to prepare for calamities. Within two years, the project can provide flood hazard maps for public access, as well as install rain gauges and water level measuring devices in a wide number of areas.

Given a climate that is no longer what most people understood it to be, the importance given by the government to the dangers the country faces from natural calamities is indeed very good and laudable and Aquino should be congratulated for the initiative.

But the government should do more than just making available the modern warning systems and information data bases related to potential weather-related disasters. It still needs to flex its muscle and exercise political will in carrying out mandatory remedial measures.

The best and most modern warning systems and disaster data bases will amount to nothing if the public for whom all these have been set up and set in motion will still stand in the way of prudence and common sense.

As has always been the case, it is the poor people who are most at risk from natural calamities. Yet it is these very same people who are the most intransigent when it comes to moving them out of harm’s way.

It has become a very convenient excuse for these people to cite their poverty in refusing to move. Project Noah will not mean anything if these people, citing nowhere else to go, will still refuse to budge despite impending calamities. Aquino must use an iron fist if he has to.

We have very high hopes for Project Noah. There was only one sore thumb sticking out during its launching, however, and this was the presence at the launching of Risa Hontiveros. What on earth was she doing there? Nothing about her can be related to the weather.

We all know, of course, that Baraquel is running for the Senate. But did she have to be at an affair that she has absolutely nothing to do about? This was a cheap political shot by both Aquino and Baraquel and we hope it does not jinx the project altogether.