It’s not OK to be OK with floods

I’ve been on medical leave and working from home during the Crising-Dante-Emong-habagat delubyo and have mercifully been spared from having to forge through gutter- to waist-deep floods. But no sickbed or ivory tower can keep one from seeing the miserable reality of our citizens – having to wait hours in the pouring rain for a bus or jeepney or motorcycle ride to get to work or home, wading through flooded streets and even having their home literally invaded by floodwaters, having their farmlands or small businesses inundated or washed away.

Where are those much ballyhooed 5,000 flood control projects located and were any of them able to eliminate or at least mitigate floods in the area?

Public Works Secretary Manuel Bonoan is the man of the hour, guest on every television talk show, everybody wanting to know why – why such severe flooding; why the thousands of flood control projects failed to control the floods; why this is what we must contend with every typhoon, every monsoon season; why, with the billions spent (P1.9 trillion from 2011 to 2025, according to Sen. Panfilo Lacson), nothing or very little has improved.

Mr. Bonoan said it is not just 5,000 but more like 10,000 such projects nationwide under this administration. From July 2022 until May 2025, 9,856 such projects have been completed, with 5,700 more ongoing. I guess none of these 9,856 projects were built in Parañaque, Navotas or Marikina, since these places suffered such horrible flooding in the past few days. I trust – hope – that these projects the DPWH chief talks about are real, actually constructed (whether functioning properly or not is another matter), unlike perhaps those under the P2.9 billion allocated for flood control projects in Bulacan (gee, my officemate was trapped in her house for days, as were motorists along the NLEX portion of Bulacan) and the P1.2 billion for Sorsogon in that obscene 2025 national budget. So far, the two senators – from Bulacan and Sorsogon – supposedly responsible for those insertions have not given any categorical answers on this, except to, as usual, blame the “current political climate” and to say “I will not go down to their level.”

Now that the (dis)honorable senators will probably not get to wear their crimson judges’ robes and Mary Grace Piattos can happily chill with her chichirya, what’s to become of accountability and transparency and judicious use of the people’s money?

I’ve been watching Mr. Bonoan on TV and while, in a way, I admire his very calm, unruffled demeanor, that may not always be an asset. For example, I cannot help but wonder whether he raised a hue and cry or even at least questioned or protested when the 2025 DPWH budget was stuffed with those anomalous insertions and bloated to a jaw-dropping P1.1 trillion. (I asked the same question of the then Senate finance committee chairperson – another very nice person – and didn’t get an answer.)

Anyway, Mr. Bonoan cites three reasons for those horrendous floods, at least in the metropolis. First is climate change, the be-all and end-all explanation for the crazy weather patterns not just here but all over the world. Which means that this is now our new normal and while we can’t really do anything to change that, we must adapt and learn to live with it.

Another is the conveyance capacity of our drainage system, first constructed around 1909 during the American period but upgraded along the way, with some drain pipes laid in the 1960s and 1970s. He says the system is about 70 percent silted, which severely impedes the outflow of rainwater. The rehabilitation of 35 pumping stations in Metro Manila is scheduled to be done by next year. After Ondoy in 2009, a Metro Manila Flood Management Master Plan was developed but, 16 years later, we’re still basically in the same situation.

The third is basura, all that garbage that we so easily, mindlessly discard. Blaming trash clogging esteros, creeks and rivers is often labeled as being anti-poor (hey, it’s not only the poor who improperly dispose of garbage) but it is a fact, a reality that every single one of us must take responsibility for. Even a cigarette butt or a candy wrapper carelessly thrown on the sidewalk comes back to haunt us when the drain clogs up and rainwater cannot flow out.

Yes, government, especially our corrupt officials (is that like almost the entire bureaucracy?), must accept the blame and do something – many things – to address the flooding issue. But let’s be mindful of what we can do, because it’s really not OK to be OK with constant, repeated flooding.