For the older generation among us, the world today is not, to borrow the words of Engelbert Humperdinck, what it used to be. It has changed rapidly and continues to change in mind boggling and disturbing pace. The most widely felt among these changes are the disturbances in weather. In fact, we have come to coin the term “climate change” perhaps, in our acceptance of, though not necessarily in our preparation for them.
When I was in elementary, for instance, our geography teacher told us that the Leyte Samar provinces constituted the typhoon belt. He meant that each storm that would enter the so-called Philippine Area of Responsibility would pass thru that region. And if they then came, they reached our islands not in the present bunches and dizzying frequencies of storms. Indeed, we all observed that the last decade saw a change in the climactic pattern with the northeastern part of Luzon getting to be, for the lack of a better term, the entry point of typhoons.
The seemingly most destructive form of the weather changes are seen in the amount of rainfall. As we presently observe, the rains that hit our country do not come in ordinary volumes. When Ondoy struck in Luzon two years ago, it brought in less than three days the volume of water that, years before, would be spread in two to three months. If that was a frightening description, that was how our weather authorities explained the catastrophic floods Ondoy spawned.
Here in Cebu City, in two different days last week, we were severely flooded. Many parts of our city went under water causing woeful damage such as, but not limited to, traffic grinding to a halt. The rising level of water did not spare even those places, which people imagined were flood-free. A friend of mine who resides in a high-end subdivision located in an elevated area between Banilad and Talamban described, in startling details, how water burst open the large pipes and drowned a lower part of the village. He has been a resident in that subdivision for decades and it was, in his recollection, the first time that they ever witnessed a flooding of their neighborhood.
What was gruesome was that there were no storms last week to hit our province. Rains, in volumes never before witnessed, caused the inundations. And they were the kind of rains in a season that our weather specialists forecast is the beginning of El Niño. Why would rains generate enough huge volumes of water as to cause floods?
When our city got flooded on January 25, 2011, there were no storms also. The city administration was so shocked that they wanted to understand out why the calamity ever took place. Among their findings was that the rivers, esteros and other waterways of the city had been clogged up. They advanced many reasons for the clogging. In other words, the rain was not the principal cause of the flooding. The slow exit of the water to the sea was the culprit.
Government officials revealed what all of us know. They said that the banks of our waterways have been taken over by settlers. These are families, mostly from neighboring provinces, who got lured by the glitters of city life. They have come to settle here where they do not own parcels of habitable land. Their only recourse was to occupy the first vacant land they spotted. More often than not, these are the banks of our rivers.
Having said that, the city mayor embarked on a project to remove the silt and clear the waterways of settlers. His objective for doing so was to save hundreds of families from the flash floods. To him, there would be necessary disturbance to some settlers but the majority of the city residents would benefit.
But, as soon the operations to clear the pilot site of the Mahiga Creek began, a civil case was filed before the courts naming the mayor and the city government defendants. The court action was backed up by the politician who planned to contest the position of the mayor in 2013. Clearly, the motivation was political. So, the clearing stopped and, if I may add, the flooding in our city continues. So, what now? Your answer is better than my imagination.