Manila Monsoon Flood Aug 2012

I am still shocked to talk about the flood because this time the flood came to the doorsteps of my daughter’s home in Makati. I had the scare of my life. I am still analyzing my young daughter’s nonchalance to the flood. She said, “Yesterday I woke up to see that the thigh-high flood that took a two-day residence upon our neighborhood in Makati was gone with minimal trace. Like nothing happened! It was surreal but not nice. I am reminded of the African Serengeti, a place far away from modern civilization, untouched by modern agriculture. It is bone-dry and transforms into a desert during the dry season and when monsoon season arrives, the land is transformed into vast arrays of lakes and rivers. I like to think that resilience is the best weapon against natural calamities---most of which had already been going on for millions of years, long before we came about. The "wisdom of the crowd," like a herd of African wildebeest, knows best to brush off the dust, move on and fight or take flight to survive.”



I hope like many others in Manila, my daughter is not in disaster denial and not so traumatized. She stayed the night in the office sleeping lounge at the height of the flood & had to ride a water raft for a hefty sum from office to home in the morning. Maybe it helped that she knows she can swim like a fish. And thanks to modern communications, we were in touch moment by moment during the flood. Tons of words have been twitted & posted in media on this massive flood brought about by torrential rains from this August Habagat Southwest monsoon. One would think that after the Ondoy flood of 2009, we would be much better off in coping this time. Maybe we were & our evidence for this is that there were fewer human lives lost, compared to the Ondoy flood. The solutions are so simple that they almost defy analysis. One that needs mention was offered by Antonio Oposa Jr who in a few words said, “Again, why is there flooding? Because excess waters do not have a place to go. Solution: Find a place for it to go. How difficult can that be?” See, it is not rocket science.

We like to live in cities & certainly no one is advocating for us to return to the so called frontier lifestyle and so another real honest solution is good urban land use planning. Needless to say, even if floods affect all, floods affect our poor the hardest. Much blame was wrongly heaped on the poor & the colonies of informal settlers who have settled in river banks & clogged floodways with garbage. But, all these are real governance & urbanization issues such as housing, solid waste management, urban land use, drainage, transportation which are now conflated with global warming & climate changes. As Dr Mahar Lagman of the Department of Science & Technology (DOST) said, “Disasters happen only when people are in harm’s way.”
To adopt a line from a famous comedian, if we live near the crater of a volcano, we should not be surprised if hot lava enters our living room. Likewise, if people live near rivers & waterways, these informal settlers will always be at the mercy of river outflows & floods & storm surges. But, if decent housing were available to our poor, do you think they would like to live in harm’s way? Maricris Valte of the Development Academy of the Philippines says our poor are the people that serve many of us & who perform important jobs in our cities: ordinary employees, drivers, market vendors, beauticians, messengers, security guards, community organizers, even some teachers. If only one or a few families are hard hit by a preventable flood, in Sociology, we call this a personal tragedy but if hundreds & thousands suffered because their homes were in harm’s way, this is a social problem worse than the flood itself.

photo credit : Instagram by Christian Lacsina