Metro Manila's Disasters

By Chester B Cabalza

Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic (Copyright @ 2013 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved.) 

If Dan Brown’s obnoxious imagining of Manila as “gates of hell” trespasses our religious and social conscience, he might have valid assumptions in describing our country’s capital, predominantly Catholic and considered one of the largest metropolis in resurging Asia. Although, I would want to counter his prognosis and impure thoughts based from his creative work, I also assume that there are other Asian cities which obviously suffer the extreme curse of traffic jams and poverty porn deserving that “harsh tag” based from my own travels and firsthand information.

Now that the Philippines enters a new battle with the cyclone season, expectedly super typhoons will challenge again how far have we learned from our lessons in the past, especially in urban cities and particularly Metro Manila that has remained uneducated with its grubby esteros dumped with garbage and human feces which eventually clog drainage. 

Officials from DPWH and MMDA are pointing fingers with one another for delayed permits to fast track road reconstruction which should be done during the summer’s solstice. That opportunity to fix the streets miseries should take effect before the summer when most people in Metro Manila are retreating for summer escapades in our beautiful provinces. However, the problem comes when our public officials became defiantly lax, perhaps immersing themselves in the hullabaloos during the recently ended midterm elections last summer.

Just as when most classes in schools from primary to graduate levels had begun last week, a short heavy downpour made our day very disappointing. I had seen on live television ordeals of students and workers in commuting, walking barefoot and risking their health against complex foot diseases, protecting their leather shoes being soaked from flood. 

Then the inconvenience of killing your time boarding in noisy jeepneys and overloaded busses, deafeningly blowing horns to show frustrations of traffic jam, rowdy motorists collide surrounded by irritated drivers of all sorts - bumper to bumper and neon lights delight employees in tall buildings, opted for overtime to clear the rush hour while a sea of commuters brave to come home on a bad weather.

Last June 14 (Friday) our MNSA students from NDCP were about to visit India’s warship docked in Manila Bay. Before going to our destination, news from quadmedia updated us of the flood along Roxas boulevard, still we decided to push through with our appointment, since we were the guests. 

Along our way as we strategically decided to pass through the busy Ayala avenue, and although seated comfortably in our deluxe couches, while watching latest DVD movies, the exasperation increased as faculty and students were stuck in the middle of the country’s financial center for more than three hours. We cancelled the trip and apologized to our foreign counterpart of the crisis management many stakeholders in the city must totally confront with.   

The same mishap I experienced last June 17 (Monday) after I attended a meeting in UP Diliman. Traffic jam around the elliptical road suck and flooding almost paralyzed the city triggered by intense rains. Public officials blame informal settlers for their dumped garbage causing massive floods  or the poorest of the poor think that local and national governments must be responsible to their plight. Speaking of vicious cycle!

But what should be done? Perhaps penitence from mother nature to get rid off from the harsh tag of being called the “gates of hell”. I thought of the act of respecting mother nature in various ways and in our own little ways do count. 

I commend environmental activist and media heiress Gina Lopez together with her able bodied “river warriors” to clean the esteros and empower local residents to safeguard their own once wasted territory. Indeed one successful estero project can produce a multiplier effect. A clean and environmental-friendly community becomes livable when all stakeholders participate in programs that will educate them to aspire for a better community.  

I condemn elitist view of some government officials to put culpability to informal settlers who are part in our city’s web of life due to incessant flooding and traffic jam in the city. We need concise and smart strategies to combat this natural and human induced crisis management issues. 

The national government knows this for sure, we cannot eradicate poverty overnight. It needs long and tedious compromising processes among stakeholders to come up with long-term solutions to unravel the causes and effects of our longstanding concerns with floods and traffic. 

There must be high-level and holistic views on this matter. The government should modernize its forecasting system (calling PAGASA). Have we not mastered sophisticated technology after 115 years of our independence? 

Problem with us we rely much from foreign technologies. We should have self-reliance in our own capacity if we want to modernize our forecasting equipment especially that we have promising scientists (fund and restructure DOST). Great countries either become innovative or reliant by strengthening its indigenous science and technology.  

Since our disaster-prone country suffers annual storms and flooding causing heavy traffic in cities, there must be cohesive mitigating measures  among cities in the metropolis! Sounds political for some! Others would claim we have newly enacted law on disaster risk and reduction. Come on, we rate poorly in implementing our own commendable laws!

I remember when I was sent by my agency to represent our country to the Network of ASEAN Defence and Security Institutes (NADI) in Siem Reap, Kingdom of Cambodia last year. Our neighbors in the region lauded our country for crafting important laws on disaster risk and reduction which they are trying to replicate in their own respective countries. Our law/s has become a model for other countries. Remember also that natural disasters are transnational and deterritorialized. It chooses no place and no nation-state.

Lastly, we have been experiencing rainy season yearly causing heavy traffic and massive flooding in the past decades. Rainy season is here to stay forever (remember “amihan” and “habagat”). In other words, we can and should easily mitigate these problems since I presume we have greatly adapted to our traditional culture of resiliency during monsoon season. 

We had already experienced the worst typhoons in our cities and for sure more are coming in the future. How come we have not yet learned and adapted from it in a decent way, given the sophistication and availability of technologies therein to help us reduce this recurring problems. This is certainly a slap for all of us people in urban cities, particularly to public officials and enforcers on how to simplify our policies and implement coordinately our pragmatic solutions to flooding and traffic. 

Calling competent crisis managers!