Last week’s heavy monsoon rains brought the National Capital Region and the rest of Luzon to a standstill.
Many homes were submerged by the floods while our workers were forced to wade through the floods. Some chose to work from home because of inaccessible roads and the difficulty to find transportation.
Some 201.7 millimeters of rain, per the weather agency, fell in just five hours in one day, or equivalent to about 44 percent of the rainfall brought by Typhoon Ondoy over a 24-hour period on September 26, 2009.
Flooding is a perennial problem, especially in Metro Manila and other low-lying areas outside the capital region. It is a disruptive force that causes damage to property and deaths, in extreme cases.
Fortunately, the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is looking for solutions to control the floods.
President Marcos last week said the government is studying the possibility of digging underground water-retention facilities beneath existing public spaces, including football fields and open areas. The plan seeks to strengthen the defense of Metro Manila against increasingly intense rainfall, such as the one we experienced last week.
The facilities seek to temporarily store excess rainwater and help ease flooding during periods of heavy rainfall. President Marcos reported that the government has identified 30 potential sites for the proposed underground facilities. The sites include Raja Sulaiman, Rizal Memorial, and Camp Bagong Diwa.
The government has sought the help of experts from The Netherlands, a nation that has skillfully averted flooding despite its below sea-level location. The Dutch experts studied possible locations here where additional water-retention capacity could be built under existing facilities.
‘Under existing facilities, such as football fields and open fields, areas can be excavated even if buildings are present,’ says President Marcos.
Conventional flood-control measures could no longer be relied upon, especially in times of heavier rainfalls associated with climate change.
The proposed underground water-retention facilities are no different from water-impounding dams that the countryside needs to sustain agricultural farming. The Philippines faces heavy rains after the dry season. Unfortunately, we cannot store the excess water to help in farm irrigation due to the lack of impounding dams. The water merely flows into rivers and the open sea, depriving our farmers of the resource they need during the dry season.
The lack of discipline is, likewise, contributing to the flooding in the metropolis. We saw on television footage last week the trash and garbage that clogged our waterways, eventually resulting in the flooding. We could probably solve half of the flooding problem if we have the discipline to dispose our trash properly.
The government, in the meantime, is seeking a unified stand to address residual waste to prevent it from ending up in waterways and polluting the environment. Metro Manila alone generates an estimated 9,000 metric tons of solid waste daily.
Recycling the waste into energy is one solution. Based on estimates of the Department of Energy (DOE), the current waste stream in the metropolis could support around 200 megawatts of waste-to-energy (WTE) capacity, subject to the availability and suitability of feedstock and other technical requirements
Waste that can no longer be reused or recycled, according to Energy Secretary Sharon S. Garin, should not simply end up in landfills or waterways.
‘Subject to strict environmental safeguards, appropriate residual waste can be converted into useful energy and contribute to our power supply,’ she says.
The DOE is stepping up the implementation of its WTE program following President Marcos’s renewed call to turn residual waste into a productive resource, and amid concerns over garbage accumulating in waterways and contributing to flooding.
Mindanao, meanwhile, needs similar water-retention facilities to assist farmers during a dry spell.
It may be the rainy season in Luzon and the Visayas where heavy rains are disrupting daily activities and flooding communities. But other parts of the country are experiencing the opposite weather conditions.
Heat indices in the southern part of the Philippines reached the weather bureau’s ‘danger’ category of 42°C to 51°C. Classes, in fact, were suspended in parts of Mindanao last week-not because of flooding, but due to high heat indices that can cause cramps, heat exhaustion and heat stroke.
Weather experts explain that Mindanao does not have a distinct wet season. Thus, if the rainy season starts in Luzon and the Visayas, it does not mean the same in Mindanao. The Southwest Monsoon, or Habagat, does not affect Mindanao.
But at the end of the day, discipline and novel approaches to solving the flooding problem will ease the plight of many Filipinos during extreme weather. We just have to be creative and mindful at the same time.