Two years ago, during a break in my radio-TV program, I spoke with former Public Works Secretary Rogelio ‘Babes’ Singson. I didn’t attach much importance to that conversation then, but I do now. Singson told me President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was looking at the possibility of creating a department devoted to water. He was being considered to head it, he said, but had declined.
The conversation returned to me this week for an unexpected reason. Scrolling through Facebook, I came across an old video of a 2023 meeting between President Marcos and Pampanga officials following another episode of severe flooding. Singson was there. And so was an argument that sounds remarkably contemporary three years later.
Singson had revived a proposal developed during his tenure at the Department of Public Works and Highways: take roughly 200 hectares of the 2,000-hectare Candaba Swamp and examine whether it could become an impounding area for excess water.
There was fierce resistance. Pampanga Rep. Anna York Bondoc warned about the livelihood of farmers and at one point threatened to walk out. Marcos listened and asked the question that matters in public policy: if not this, what do you propose? Dredging was offered as one answer.
The President’s response was instructive. Dredging might have to be done, he acknowledged, but it’s expensive and temporary. After several months, sediment returns and government dredges again.
Three years later, Pampanga was flooded again. And perhaps that old exchange contains the beginning of a different way of thinking about flood control. Instead of asking first what structure should we build, perhaps the government should ask: Where does the water come from, where should it go, where can some of it safely wait, and what prevents it from getting there? That question takes us upstream.
In Baras, Rizal, the National Bureau of Investigation arrested two individuals last April following surveillance of an alleged illegal quarrying operation in Barangay San Salvador. The NBI said mining authorities certified that no permits for mineral extraction in the municipality had been issued.
Now, it would be scientifically irresponsible to say that illegal quarrying in Baras caused the flooding now occurring in Pampanga. They belong to different river systems.
But Baras raises a question that belongs inside every modern flood-control study: What is happening to the land where rainfall first meets the ground? Forests, vegetation, soil, slopes and geology influence how quickly water moves through a watershed. Disturb those conditions and the hydrological equation can change.
Now travel downstream to Pampanga. That provides a reason for the government to go upstream, possibly in Baras, Rizal to see how quickly water enters the system. And that perhaps raises the possibility of President Marcos paying a visit to what had been tagged by the NBI as an illegal quarrying operation. That explains how water from the watershed travels and how fast because of uncontrolled quarrying.
President Marcos has now directed the government to return to flood-control studies that have accumulated over decades. Malacañang says DPWH is updating master plans and feasibility studies for the country’s major river basins, with 16 already updated and the Cagayan and Pasig-Marikina-Laguna de Bay plans targeted for completion this year.
That review should not become another exercise in producing studies. It should begin by asking what happened to the studies already produced. What was recommended? What was built? What was abandoned? What changed? What assumptions about rainfall are no longer valid? And what did we learn when the water finally tested what the government had constructed?
The old Candaba proposal deserves examination under that discipline-not automatic approval. Map the basin. Model the water. Protect the watershed. Identify where excess water can safely wait. Keep rivers and drainage paths capable of carrying what must move.
Perhaps Singson’s idea of putting
water under one institutional roof deserves another look as well. The Philippines currently divides responsibility for water among agencies concerned with public works, irrigation, environment, drinking water, dams, local government and disaster response.
Yet the same raindrop can pass through the jurisdiction of several of them before reaching Manila Bay. Maybe the deeper question is not whether the country needs another department. It is whether somebody in government must finally be responsible for the entire journey of water.
Baras reminds us to look at where that journey begins. Candaba reminds us that sometimes water needs somewhere to wait. Macabebe reminds us that eventually water needs somewhere to go.
And the floods now confronting the country may be telling us something that decades of individual projects have obscured: Flood control should not begin with concrete.
It should begin by following the water.