EDITORIAL - Two options left to address flooding

The Cebu City government appears bent on cracking down hard on violators of easement laws, or those who encroach on the city's waterways. The move is apparently an offshoot of the recent floodings in the city, which indicate in no uncertain terms that the city is running out of ideas on how to solve the lack of adequate means to address the problem.

Prior to this crackdown on encroachments on waterways, the city has tried to deepen the canals on roadsides which make up the city's sole drainage system aside from the waterways themselves, such as rivers and esteros. But roadside canals are just that - roadside canals. Instead of taking in water, they spill water onto the road to cause more flooding. Then, every once in a while, the city tries to dredge the waterways, but once in a while is clearly not enough.

The city has also tried installing culverts, but if they are not of the right dimensions, they also mean nothing in these changing times, when rains come more frequently and pour down much harder. The city has tried regulating garbage disposal and collection, throwing in an ordinance to boot that sets one day a week devoid of plastic shopping bags. The floods still keep coming.

That leaves us with only two options. One is for everyone in Cebu City to admit that floods have become inevitable in these changing times. When it rains real hard, in volumes that the experts such as meteorologists would describe as a month's worth in just, say, two hours, there is no other result to expect other than that it would cause flooding.

After accepting the inevitability of flooding, the other option left for us is to build, once and for all, a system that can drastically reduce the duration of floods. Since there is no longer any escape from floods, the best thing for us to do is find ways to make the flooding subside in the shortest time possible. And the only way to do that is to construct honest-to-goodness storm drainage systems.

Storm drainage systems are so called because they are meant to absorb, contain and control the volumes of water normally anticipated during storms. In a previous article here, we described how the city of Ormoc now has one of the best storm drainage systems in the country, if not the best, after the Japanese built one for that city following its devastation in a killer flood that saw more than 3,000 people killed.

Anyone who has been to Ormoc will not fail to see and be impressed by this system, which is nothing more than its biggest waterway widened and deepened, its embankments reinforced and laid over with stone and concrete, and with spillways and gates that open up to smaller waterways, the gates intended to let water in or out of the main waterway, depending on the volumes of water to control.