It was interesting to see the photos that were floating around social media on Tuesday, when the heavy rains caused by super typhoon Egay resulted in massive flooding at the southern area of Bacolod City, particularly along the highway at the areas in Singcang and Sum-ag.
One of the hardest hit, according to the photos, would be the area in front of the Gaisano Mall in Singcang, where the water at the street level was around waist-deep. That area had already been hit by flooding before, and as Monday demonstrated, it is still pretty much vulnerable to flooding today.
I don’t know if the numerous and almost constant roadwork in the area, that supposedly includes drainage improvements, was supposed to solve that problem. But if that was part of the goal, then it would seem that all that money, work, and inconvenience to the general public looks like it was washed away as soon as the combo of unusually heavy rains plus high tide was unleashed.
The story of the social media photos also showed that parts of the national highway in the Sum-ag area became one with the river that day. I guess the people living there should expect their perfectly usable and newly widened roads to be dug up once more, as construction crews will probably come in to do something, anything about that flooding problem.
With so much work being done on our roads, where we don’t even know if they are just tearing up concrete for the heck of it (and the profit margin of course), one would expect these flooding incidents to go away. After all, with a government that is very well versed at spending billions upon billions on these projects, one would assume that they knew what they were doing and whatever it was they are doing is based on some sort of interconnected chess master plan.
But now that the rainy season has come whilst climate change is upon us, a faraway super typhoon has apparently exposed serious flaws in the quality of master planning and execution of the numerous road and drainage projects making our life miserable with the vague promise of a better life.
The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and based on Monday’s flooding, all the work done in those badly affected areas have been pretty ineffective if we judge it on that aspect.
I wouldn’t want to be the DPWH or City engineer that has to assess what needs to be done in those areas to prevent a repeat of the flooding, especially if the convenient excuse of “unnatural rainfall” and “act of God” were to be deemed unacceptable, because we the Filipino taxpayers spent hundreds of millions of pesos on it and were inconvenienced for weeks, if not months, by the roadwork.
The fact is that those areas along the highway flooded badly.
The questions to be asked are: is the drainage there properly sized, constructed properly, connected to a main drain, and regularly maintained?
If the answer is yes to all of the above, then could there be a problem upstream or downstream of that supposedly well-built part of the drainage system? Are there any clogs or bottlenecks that need to be addressed?
If everything is well planned and perfectly built and maintained, and our public officials are down to blaming climate change, global warming and extreme weather events on the floods, then maybe the public officials involved can just put up warning signs, so we know which roads will end up flooding when it rains, where dangerous areas are, especially for light vehicles, and have rescue teams ready in those areas.
We can’t really blame the people currently in charge for continuing to build and widen roads, and even upgrade drainage systems, even in flood prone areas, because that seems to be all they know. In this country, when a government official sees a road and the weather is fair, they will inevitably want to widen it. If a storm drain exists underneath, they will break the road to make it bigger somehow. After all, someone smart must’ve decided that a road should exist there, so it is not their job anymore to question it, but only to make it better somehow. However, if half-assed efforts fail to yield improvements, then perhaps we can hold them accountable for such failures.
The problem being exposed by the recent flooding is that it seems that some roads have been built in flood prone areas, which may have been ok before, but with climate change and everything that comes with it, no amount of widening and drainage improvements may be able to prevent flooding in road that are built where floods cannot be stopped without resorting to some mega flood control project.
The question now is: will the people who live and work in those areas just brace themselves for flooding every now and then, or will our government build something better soon?*
