Subsidence

Remember Kevin Rodolfo?

Two decades ago, after Pinatubo blew its top, the US-based Filipino scientist infuriated local bureaucrats and politicians when he offered his diagnosis of the problems we confront. While the latter imagined that the post-eruption repair involved only a bit more than brushing volcanic ash off our roads, the scientist predicted that lahar flows to be a continuing problem for many decades, rerouting rivers and causing floods.

The scientist’s diagnosis of the problem proved accurate. That is not the point. Politicians and bureaucrats prefer to scale down problems to suit the proportions of the responses they are capable of delivering. They hate problems being scaled up beyond anything they can do — or at least anything they can do before the next elections.

Lately, the same scientist has been issuing warnings about Mega Manila and Pampanga sinking. Forget about global warming. This weather abnormality only adds a centimeter a year to the sea level. Mega Manila and nearby provinces are sinking at many times that rate.

No one really wanted to listen to the man’s scientific prediction. He was treated like he was the boy who cried “wolf!”

No one wanted to hear the problem framed in such magnitude that all efforts present resources allow seem entirely futile. Political leaders prefer to imagine all problems as amenable to the puny solutions they conjure — especially if they are allergic to working at a frantic and constant pace.

Not until last week’s floods hit us did we choose to listen more intently to the scientists drawing a dreary picture of our fate.

This week, the UP Marine Science Institute reinforced what Rodolfo has been saying all along. Large portions of the metropolis and nearby provinces are indeed sinking. “Subsidence” is the technical term for the phenomenon.

The numbers they supply are chilling. Part of Malabon, for instance, is sinking 10 centimeters annually, compounded by the 1 centimeter rise in sea level due to global warming. Parts of Pampanga are sinking at a more dramatic rate, about half a meter annually.

If the metropolitan area and surrounding provinces are sinking into the sea, what can be done to arrest that phenomenon?

Whatever solution there might be, if any, will surely require a dramatic upsizing of the infrastructure solutions offered so far. Whatever those solutions might be, they are beyond what we can afford — especially after we antagonized foreign donors by arbitrarily cancelling infrastructure contracts, such as the dredging and reclamation work for Laguna de Bay.

When President Aquino visited flood-prone Marikina in the smiling company of his brightly garbed senatorial candidates, he made it sound like the flooding might be licked by damming the river. That river, we need to caution, follows the route of an active fault line — which could be the reason our forebears never even toyed with the idea of building dams there.

He also brushed aside the matter of de-silting the lake, which he reduced to “playing with mud.” Eventually, his aides came up with a five-year plan to control the floods involving a budget of some P300 billion.

That plan, much of which lifted from the post-Ondoy studies commissioned by the previous administration but shelved for two years by the present one, hardly reassures now that we are told the city is sinking into the sea. Hardly reassuring, indeed, considering that we now know so many of the pumping stations we have are in disrepair, the flood gates are not functioning and the Taguig pumps, which actually work, ran out of fuel at the height of the floods.

Breakdown

Set aside the “hard” infrastructure we need to cope with flooding. It will likely require decades for us to bring them up to standards.

It seemed, until last week, that we had adequate “soft” infrastructure: the facilities and service providers that enable us to communicate during a calamity. That, too, was a dreadful disappointment.

For three days, when the flooding was at its worst, I tried to call my sons to check on them. For three days, I could not get through. They both use a different mobile phone services provider than the one I use.

They tell me that their chosen telecoms company is presently upgrading their network.

When might this upgrade be finally done? So many stories are told of dropped calls, lost SMS, astronomical billings for data services and exceedingly slow data transmission.

It is bad enough that our waterways are not conveying water properly so that they fill our living rooms. Should our phones also be so useless during calamities?

A friend recently bought an “unlimited” data plan from the same provider for iPad use. It turns out one must have unlimited time as well to wait for downloads.

People knowledgeable about the telecoms industry say this provider is frantically upgrading to meet current demand. The surge in demand brought about by smart phones was not fully anticipated. That makes them only slightly more evolved than our government.

Any high-tech service provider, I suppose, must know the curve enough to be ahead of it. The fashionable term for it, used by its rivals, is future-proofing. There is a higher standard technology companies must meet, a standard too high to impose on government, of course.