Home    

Instead of the start of the rainy season headlined in our newspaper last May 31, it became a season of drought for the Philippines.

The farmers weren’t made happy after all.

A bad situation became worse last week when President GMA started to hint at declaring her need for emergency powers. That touches a collective nerve-ending for Filipinos who still remember the Marcos era. Emergency powers have seldom, if ever, been used benevolently in this country.

Maybe for a change the gods were on the side of the people.

We’ve had two tropical storms pass through the archipelago this week, and a third one has been forecasted. The dams are starting to fill, albeit still not enough. More rain is needed. Emergency powers are not.

Yet good news for the dams is not all good news for us urbanites.

The flash floods are back. With a vengeance. Even some farmers are cying, “too much, already!”

Creeks, rivers and other waterways have overflowed; sewers have backed up. Some 400 flood control personnel have been “tasked to de-clog the inlets and the drainage system in Metro Manila to let flash floods subside much faster…” Good luck!

Malabon, a city within Metro Manila, was declared 90% submerged. In too many areas of Manila the floodwaters are knee-deep to waist-deep. Commuters are stranded; schools are closed.

Look at this superb front page shot on the left taken close to our home here – pedestrians being carried across the road by heavy equipment. What a scream!

Our house-angel (aka house help) of a dozen years or so, Edward, left early today to deal with the 6”-deep water in his kitchen. He needs to build a water retaining wall that will cost him nearly a month of his income (of course we spring for it).

Unfortunately Edward’s case is not at all unique; he’s but one of thousands in the metropolis who suffer a deluge in their homes each rainy season. So far, some 12,000+ families have been displaced or evacuated from their submerged homes, most of which, not surprisingly, are shanties built on riversides. The papers also list flood-related deaths by electrocution and drowning in mudslides. The UN warns that millions in South Asia now face risks to their health from lack of clean water after the unusually severe monsoon flooding.

Maybe the gods are not so kind after all. Or more likely we have brought this on ourselves… these erratic weather patterns look to me like signs of global warming.

It’s abysmal enough that the perennial floods occur and people suffer.

Insult is added to injury when the incompetent politicians point their hysterical fingers of blame at anything or anyone but the real problem: the over-extraction of groundwater and land use mismanagement (see my story).

Instead, culpability is being hurled at squatters and their garbage – a classic case of blaming the victim – or at other government departments for not completing flood control projects, or , or…

“Operation Potholes” begins… motley crews of road workers wearing t-shirts and rubber flip-flops fill holes in roads and highways that were built with sub-standard materials to start with. The photo on the right shows garbage collectors in Manila Bay with no safety clothing; these are employed city workers, not scavengers, declares the paper!

Feeble damage control, this.

And so the emergency just changes its form. Yet with or without a declaration of an emergency, GMA and the rest of the bickering elected politicians appear to remain powerless to stop this world of hurt.

As so many in this country like to say, “The Filipino deserves better.”