The floods that came with Tropical Depression Verbena on Tuesday morning were among the worst I have ever seen, particularly in Bacolod City, where several areas were inundated.
That morning was the first time I ever had to make a U-turn because of floodwaters that were too scary along Lacson Street in Mandalagan. The car had already waded through two flooded areas of highway, and I had already considered turning back earlier, but upon reaching that point, I knew that the risk and potential cost/penalty for dumbly pushing ahead was simply not worth the reward of being to work on time.
The alternate route that we took was fortunately less flooded, but my wife ended up working in a coffee shop that morning because her place of work was rendered totally inaccessible by the flood waters that would be estimated at chest-high at the deepest parts of Lacson Street, where her office was located. Although her office stayed dry because the building was elevated from the street, there was simply no way to get there without taking a leptospirosis swim or a ferryboat.
As usual, it was the public officials that got the blame for the flooding. They should’ve known that because that is the price of aspiring for public office, but this time, it looks like they’ve gotten themselves in quite a pickle because most Filipinos are also linking their own local flooding problems to the national corruption scandal that is focused on flood control projects.
Right now, the general consensus in this country is that majority of our elected officials are corrupt because of the system that they exist in, where kickbacks and bribes are so normal that there is probably an operations manual for it. Because of that impression, when major disasters like floods occur, most Filipinos assume that the failure is because of a deadly combination of corruption and incompetence.
In the district of Bacolod City alone, billions of pesos has most likely been spent on flood control projects over the past decade, but as Tuesday painfully demonstrated, it would seem that those projects are useless, and therefore a waste of the taxpayer’s money. That the current mayor was also the city’s congressman for 9 years only adds to the head scratching, mostly because of the significant role of Congress in the current flood control controversy.
The best way for the sitting public officials to shift the unforgiving spotlight of blame away from themselves is to stop the flooding from ever happening again. However, as the frequency and intensity of flood disasters have increased, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, both for them and their constituents. Hopefully, whatever dredging, clearing, cleaning, widening and deepening of flood control projects and natural waterways that they are desperately trying to undertake will help. However, if it doesn’t then someone will have to pay the price for being in power for so long, spending so much public funds on a problem that turns out to be getting worse instead of better.
If they cannot fix the flooding problem with clean ups and better maintenance efforts, then we might have to throw even more money at it. But before they do that, our officials will have to prove to their people that the billions of pesos that were poured into flood control projects over the past decade were not lost to corruption and incompetence.
First of all, an audit of all those projects has to be made. List them all down and find them to ensure that there are no ghost projects. That should be the easiest part. If the projects are legit, its proud proponents will have a list and be able to find them all.
If the projects are proven to exist, are they built up to specifications? Given today’s technology, that should be easy to check, even for projects that are buried underground.
At that point, most would be content if the projects exist and the specifications are found correct, but since we are already wallowing in flood waters every time it rains, we might as well go the extra mile to determine what really went wrong so we can clear our officials of the blame they are getting for their past and current performance.
That means going into deep technical and financial analysis of their flood control projects that are supposedly up to supposedly specs. Do the as-built specs match the budget, meaning there is no overpricing and kickbacks? Should the project even be there or was it just put there without any thought or analysis, because someone wanted/needed to spend public funds? Is it even connected to a comprehensive flood control network or is it a useless dead end? Who is supposed to maintain it and are there funds for that?
Any public official who is confident in the integrity of their projects would welcome such audits, even spearhead it, because passing would tell their constituents, once and for all, that they have done all that they can infrastructure-wise, and that the floods were truly an act of God or force majeure. All that can be done at that point is to be better prepared in the future, or throw even more money at the issue.
If they can’t prove that their projects are neither useless nor corrupted, then they will have to continue getting blamed for all the floods. Will their faces be thick enough to take it? Only time will tell.*
