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Contrary to general knowledge, the Philippines does have four seasons: Hot, Hotter, Hottest and Wet. This story is about the wet season and, its most salient feature in Manila, the flash flood.

The wet season had officially started. May 31. Summer is over, bring out the rain gear. How did I know? Because our newspaper said so; the headline pronounced: RAINY SEASON STARTS TODAY. The article went on to say:

Rainwater from Tuesday’s heavy downpour, which caused floods and massive traffic jams all over Metro Manila, as well as rain from previous days have come close to breaching the required amount of rainfall set by the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa).

(The Philippine Star, May 31, 2007)

[Got that? I didn’t. I read it three times and failed to grasp the meaning of that sentence. Should I ever write a sentence so convoluted, may the gods of literacy strike me. But this story is not about my disgust with local newspapers; it really is about the weather.]

Okay, then, so “breaching the required amount” for what? Oh, read on. Two paragraphs later the article explains that the weather bureau can declare the start of the rainy season when each of five Pagasa stations located around the country collects a minimum of 25 mm of rain water for four… or five days. Scientific, huh?

Well, the farmers are happy to see the rains, we are also told. Good for them. Really. Someone should be happy. In the urban centers there is less to be happy about.

We already knew a week earlier that we were moving out of the hottest season when day temperatures started to drop from a steamy 34-35°C (in the shade!) and brief afternoon showers cooled evenings to a tolerable below 30. And on that Tuesday, before reading the paper, we knew the wet season had arrived in earnest when a storm blew us off the brand new covered tennis court at our humble tennis club and we almost couldn’t make it home through the predictable flash floods.

Back in the early 90’s, the highway from Makati, the central financial and residential area, to our home in Alabang in the suburbs of Manila, used to get badly inundated quite regularly each wet season. One rainy night it took us seven hours to drive home from visiting friends in town – a mere 12 kms – and that was partly because we made the lucky choice to get off the highway and take the service road. Others, we later heard, were stuck in their cars on the highway overnight. We rarely take this highway these days, but from what I read in the news, nothing is new.

You can imagine why, then, for a while sellers of disposable “comfort bags” did brisk business [for a clue to what those might be, understand that a washroom/WC is called a comfort room in the Philippines]. But we haven’t seen any of the vans advertising these contraptions for sale driving around in recent years, so I conclude the market’s enthusiasm for them must have waned. The flash floods of this season certainly have not.

My personal favorite memory of a flood experience in Manila was of time when we still had the diesel truck. Lordson was behind the wheel; I sat beside him. We were in Makati on our way home when the clouds burst. Within 15 minutes we could see the first signs of flash floods, so the aim was to get home as soon as possible. This promised to be a nasty one. The deluge was relentless, like sheets of glass falling from the dark sky. Surrounded by slow moving vehicles – cars, jeepneys, trucks, buses – we arrived at an intersection that involved traffic coming in and out from about eight different directions and it looked to be quite a nasty gridlock already. We were chatting that this could be a major jam; readying ourselves for the worst.

We slowly advanced until the entrance to the highway was visible to our right, but we were at once dismayed to see the large – about four car lengths’ – flooded area dividing us and the ramp that then sloped rather sharply out of the water upward to the highway. On first glance, it did not look passable. Excited young boys had come over to frolic in the rain and the waist-deep water, and, it seemed, they were ready to push stuck cars out of the way.

Then all of a sudden I was aware of a break in the line of cars to our right and for a split second I just knew we had an opening. It was now or never. “Step on it, dear… go for it now now NOW!” I shrieked and in the next instant, Lordson floored the accelerator and dashed the truck into the water.

We held our breaths as the water splashed over the windshield, hoping we had gotten enough momentum to float that truck right across that mini-pond. We drifted onwards, inch-by-inch, like a small ferryboat on a river, until finally we could feel the front tires hit hard ground again. Spit, splatter, sputter sputter… headlights blinking… and varoom… we made it!

The continuing flash floods are an enigma to us. Little is done to prevent this annual mayhem – not only the horrific traffic, but people falling into open manholes, shanties swept away, homes ruined, even people killed — the gruesome stories are many. I mean, we KNOW Manila is partly under sea level, don’t we, and we KNOW the sewers are a clogged mess of irresponsibly discarded garbage and can’t handle the deluge, and yet…? What is the response of the people that are supposed serve? Nada.

I went searching for some rational clues on the Internet and found this interesting abstract of a scholarly article:

Land subsidence resulting from excessive extraction of groundwater is particularly acute in East Asian countries. Some Philippine government sectors have begun to recognise that the sea-level rise of one to three millimetres per year due to global warming is a cause of worsening floods around Manila Bay, but are oblivious to, or ignore, the principal reason: excessive groundwater extraction is lowering the land surface by several centimetres to more than a decimetre per year. Such ignorance allows the government to treat flooding as a lesser problem that can be mitigated through large infrastructural projects that are both ineffective and vulnerable to corruption. Money would be better spent on preventing the subsidence by reducing groundwater pumping and moderating population growth and land use, but these approaches are politically and psychologically unacceptable. Even if groundwater use is greatly reduced and enlightened land-use practices are initiated, natural deltaic subsidence and global sea-level rise will continue to aggravate flooding, although at substantially lower rates.

(Kelvin S. Rodolfo, Fernando P. Siringan (2006)
Disasters 30 (1), 118–139. link to abstract)

I did not read the entire article (it was for sale), but I got the message: we live in a land of ostriches.

Not only do the various levels of government do too little, but guess what is the response of the people so badly served? Also nada. Bahala na, as they say here (come what may). So we are doomed to watch a bad situation worsen. The flash floods are here to stay.

There is nothing much for us longtime resident foreigners to do but endure and wait out the annual couple of months of flash floods for the very pleasant hot season to arrive once more. In the meantime, we continue to appreciate the lush tropical greenery that surrounds us, a lushness that probably could not be were it not for these annual monsoons.