Just recently, a columnist in this newspaper wrote about a forum held in a Cebu City hotel featuring the old waterways of this city.
The forum featured how the city was once dominated by huge and multiple waterways, many of them wide enough to accommodate boats bringing in goods, and how many parts of the city were actually once separated from the mainland by water.
Eventually, those isolated areas were connected to the mainland to accommodate a growing population, and the old waterways themselves shrunken even more and more to accommodate residences until these were practically forgotten because they were no longer part of economic activity.
And this is why when it rains many streets of the city turn into waterways.
Some folks say water has a memory; it will pass through areas that it once did, and that it remembers its old routes.
This isn’t true, of course. While it may appear like a living force, water isn’t sentient and therefore has no memory or way to move where it wants to get to. But what is true is that it will trace its old pathways because of how nature works, gravity and paths of least resistance included.
So if it once flowed a certain way it will likely do so again, even if man has decided to redirect that path, even if man has decided to build where it once freely flowed. The water will not care about the things or the people in its path; it goes where it has to go.
The forum concluded that we ignore Cebu’s old waterways to our own peril, something that we do agree with.
Aside from flood control projects --another topic that is getting a life of its own because of a different issue entirely-- perhaps our engineers and city officials should look at our old maps to see how the water once flowed and how nature can be tamed again.
Who are we kidding, no one can tame nature. However, it can be worked around and mitigated to an extent that it will not cause widespread damage to property or misery to people.