Flooding in Metro: who is to blame?

MANILA - Floods are no novelty to 54-year-old Jeff Flores. A street cleaner along Araneta Avenue, Quezon City, Flores has lived along the banks of a nearby river for more than 4 decades.

He and his neighbors have come to expect that the river would overflow and soak them in knee-deep waters whenever the rains come during the monsoon season.

Tropical storm Ondoy, however, caught them unawares. “The news said it would only be signal no. 1,” Flores recalled. Half an hour after the waters started to rise, however, what seemed like an ordinary flood managed to engulf their two-storey plywood-made house. “Ang bilis talaga [umakyat ng tubig],” he said, shaking his head.

Flores and his family had no choice but to climb up to the roof of their house and stay there until floodwaters subsided the following morning.

His experience is shared by hundreds of thousands of other residents of Metro Manila and its environs who lost their homes and possessions in the onslaught of typhoon Ondoy.

Naturally flood prone

Many blamed the devastation on climate change. In 24 hours, Ondoy dumped over a month's volume of rain on the metropolis and its surrounding areas in just 9 hours.

But in the case of Metro Manila, urban planners and public works engineers say that is not all there is to it. And while they warn people of more calamities resulting from global warming, even some climate change experts also share this opinion.

Frequent flooding in Metro Manila, these experts say, is brought about by a confluence of factors.

Climate change, population pressure, and the fact that proper urban planning is bogged down by politics and corruption in government exacerbates matters. But even without these factors, a substantial portion—about a fifth—of the 63,000 land area that makes up Metro Manila, is naturally flood prone.

To a great extent, this is caused by the fact that the water level at the Manila Bay, particularly during high tide, is higher than the elevation of many inland localities, public works engineers told this writer during an interview a few years back.