After those few hot weeks of summer which a lot of us expected to be much longer because of all that talk of El Niño, it looks like we ended up with an intense yet quick episode of the dry season this year, as the rainy season seems to be upon us already.
The past few weeks have already been cloudy/rainy, and it is funny that the summer heat ended along with the school year in private sector, although it looks like most public schools still have classes, which could be a good thing for the students who have had to deal with the intense heat in crowded classrooms when the summer heat was peaking. Now that classrooms aren’t so hot anymore, we can expect public officials to forget about any plans and proposals to roll back the academic year to its former schedule which actually made a bit sense in a tropical country because schools ended before the heat became too intense.
I was actually hoping for a bit more of the summer weather, as the family hadn’t scheduled any outdoor activities yet, since the kids were still busy with school up to early/mid-June. But with PAGASA having declared the onset of the rainy season early this month, we will just have to make adjustments, or just bring rain gear, when making plans for what is left of the so-called “summer break.”
The end of summer is a good thing and a bad thing, depending on your perspective. What was good about summer were more opportunities for outdoor activities, less car washes, properly dried laundry, and maximum production for those with solar PV panels on the roof. As for the bad, well the most obvious drawbacks would be related to the intensely uncomfortable heat.
Anyway, summer may be officially declared over, but an El Niño is still expected, so in the spirit of climate change and global warming, we can still expect the weather to be funky.
The beginning of the rainy season should also test the many drainage improvement projects we’ve been seeing being done all around in the past few months. I don’t know if the DPWH and its contractors scheduled the drainage works during the dry season, because they lately haven’t seemed to be following any sort of schedule and are just closing down roads to break down and “improve” at will over the past few years, but now that that window has closed, we can expect the torrential rains to come and provide the ultimate stress test for the millions of pesos our government has poured into these projects.
If they did their jobs well, then the flooding problems that we’ve been experiencing should be resolved. If they failed, then the results would be made pretty obvious in the coming weeks, as more rains fall. Hopefully they did they jobs well, because that is what we spent millions, if not billions, of our hard-earned taxes on. This means the drainage “upgrades” were designed and constructed properly, and then cleared of construction debris before being covered and turned over as completed.
If they did a terrible job, the stress test of the incoming rains will expose any and all faults immediately. If you come to think of it, that should be good for everybody as such comprehensive testing will allow government to run after the contractors and compel them to come back and fix messes.
The areas around these myriad of drainage works, where contractors were probably hoping for an extended dry season to make things slightly easier, will make for interesting observation once the heavy rains fall with consistency. When it comes to the areas where work hasn’t finished, we will need to be a bit more reasonable and expect things the get worse before they get better, just like the traffic caused by the multiple concrete-pouring related projects that have been popping up all over, seemingly without any rhyme or reason.
All other existing drainage pipes, canals, and waterways would have hopefully been cleared and cleaned during the dry season, when water levels were low and the opportunity presented itself. If the people running our towns and cities were proactive and alert, these maintenance works would have already been over and done with weeks ago, without any fanfare. If not, expect the public officials involved to make a big show of doing what they are actually paid to do.
It feels weird that the rainy season has already been declared and schoolkids have either just started their break or are still in school. Hopefully our public officials are not like me who was surprised by the rainy season, when it was actually us who changed the schedule, while nature just kept on keeping on, although with the caveat that the rains are becoming more intense as time goes by.
It would be nice if our towns and cities are more prepared for the rainy season this year, with the expected effects from climate change and global warming in mind, compared to the most of us, who are only dealing with academic calendars and vacation plans.*
