Sometime this month, the first of the migratory birds will come down over Candaba. They have been doing it for longer than anyone has kept records: ducks, herons and shorebirds flying in from northern Asia to spend the dry months on the wetlands of Pampanga. They come because, for a few months every year, Candaba is water.
We tend to forget that. On the map, Candaba is a town, a stretch of rice land, a viaduct that motorists cross without looking down. To the river system of Central Luzon, it is something else: a basin. For centuries the overflow of the Pampanga River and its tributaries spread out across this low ground in the wet season, sat there, and drained away slowly when the rains stopped. The swamp was not wasted land. It was the region’s sponge.
At the end of August, the sponge was full. A river wall in San Simon gave way, and water ran downhill from about five metres of elevation toward ground that sits a metre or two above the sea. More than 540 hectares went under. We have spent a month arguing about which wall failed and whose road it was. We have spent almost no time asking where the water was trying to go.
It was trying to go where it always went.
A floodplain is not a place that floods by accident. Flooding is its job. The seasonal rise of the water is what renews the soil, feeds the fish, and brings the birds back every October. Farmers in Candaba have known this for generations.
What has changed is how much of that basin we have taken away. Every hectare raised, paved, walled or permanently drained is a hectare that can no longer hold floodwater. It goes to the next lowest place, which is increasingly a barangay, a market road, or a highway. We have been shrinking the sponge and acting surprised when it overflows.
Before we pour another metre of concrete, we should ask what this low ground was doing before we took it.
The birds will be back over the swamp in a few weeks. They will find it, as they always do, because the water is still there. The question is whether we will still be able to say the same thing in twenty years, and whether the towns around it will be dry enough to watch them arrive.