By Dianne Elizabeth Alcantara, The BEACON
The Southwest Monsoon, or Habagat, has been wrecking parts of the country with heavy rains and floods for months now. With submerged roads and emerging videos of knee-height waters, it will not leave without its presence unfelt. The Philippines is Southeast Asia’s meatshield for typhoons. Why won’t our institutions act like it is?
Let’s be honest. Our climate is only going to get worse. In five years, people will look at this year’s rainy season as the weakest in history, because next year’s rains will be even harsher. This has been the trend of our weather patterns ever since we learned how to burn coal. Each year yields the new strongest supertyphoon, or the longest consecutive chains of low-pressure areas in one week. This has been the Filipino experience for decades.
While our rains continue to get stronger by the year, flood-prone cities remain just as vulnerable as 10 years ago. In fact, many more cities within the country that were never thought to flood reported catastrophic floods and landslides. Look at Cebu. They were at the forefront of typhoon aid whenever parts of the country were flooded from typhoons. But last July? They joined Manila in the national news as streets submerged in water were seen from all around the city.
Everyone knows how much damage floods bring to homes, livelihoods, and human life itself. Thus it would be in the best interest of the country to use their resources to limit floods from damaging communities. If this is common knowledge, why are politicians putting minimal effort in making natural disasters not damage things in the first place? By now, we should be having cities and barangays more resilient to floods thanks to groundbreaking flood control structures nationwide that would impress neighboring countries. Except we do not.
Perhaps politicians forgot that Filipino resiliency does not immediately extend to houses and streets. Yes, those videos of kids swimming in pools of floodwater and those AI generated flood memes are amusing. Don’t forget the students jumping for joy for another school suspension. “The people are laughing, they are still fine!” is what a politician might think as they place the billions of pesos meant for flood control projects in their own pockets.
Behind those smiles and laughter, however, is exhaustion. Exhaustion of the system. The people’s laughs hide the fact that their submerged plywood house is not as resilient as them. The student’s drenched uniform is hidden in plain sight from their shared post about the suspension. The people who they trusted their barangays and cities to never saw beyond the laughter, and never extended some form of systemic change.
The people are not only flooded with literal floodwater, but also greed. And the latter one will make them drown, no matter how good they are at going around it. Even if they could, their government has exhausted them enough to drown regardless.
Filipinos cannot afford to swim in both waters at once. Perhaps the first flooding issue we need to control is the greed that floods our system, stalling the country from getting good disaster risk management. The resources for it are already there; just imagine those 545.64 billion pesos actually invested into flood control.
Filipinos deserve to be dry and safe in the rainy season. We should not allow ourselves to be submerged twice because of corruption. To stay afloat, we should stay away from leaders who control funds, and instead choose those who control floods.
Maybe this is how we can stop two floods at once.