WILL residents of Cebu City and environs, like our Metro Manila cousins, slosh in a world of typhoon muck and submerged homes? Look at chilling parallels Storm Ondoy offered.

Ondoy unleashed the worst floods to inundate the National Capital Region in 40 years. When you read this, Super-typhoon Pepeng may have slammed the door on the way out.

At “Ondoy’s” peak, only a fifth of the metropolis remained above water. The 277 death toll is still climbing.

Sun.Star accepts donations for victims of Typhoon Ondoy

Some 1.8 million people were displaced. They waded through sewage, stalled vehicles and garbage, to ruined homes. Economic losses could run to billions of pesos…

Can that happen here?

"What we are seeing is a phenomenon that will affect many major cities in Asia," says Neeraj Jain, Asian Development Bank country specialist for the Philippines. "Urbanization has been so rapid. Yet, the planning processes have lagged."

Over 12 million people are crammed into Manila. Cebu’s population growth is double national levels due to migrants. Squatter colonies proliferate on Metro Manila rivers and creeks--sources of their drinking water and gastroenteritis. That is cloned here in Cebu.

All Metro Manila had was a sketchy obsolete barely-funded emergency plan. Perpetually feuding metro mayors gave lip service to preparedness.

Cebu does not have even that. At the end of Mayor Osmeña’s third term, his horizons never went beyond his South Road Properties.

Tree cover, both in Manila and neighboring towns, have been whittled down. Cebu is a treeless city. In the bald 296 hectare South Reclamation area, Osmeña has not planted a single tree in over ten years.

All Cebu City rivers are treated as latrines. They’re clogged with plastic and waste. Sanitation systems are primitive. So are those of Manila.

All the scrawny under-funded National Disaster Coordinating Council could field, for example, were 25 rubber boats. And half lacked motors. Cebu has practically nothing in equipment or supplies.

A 15-minute downpour in Cebu sends Colon and other thoroughfares underwater. Consider what “Ondoy” rainfall would unleash here.

“A government, spilling over with VAT taxes, meanwhile, held out the begging bowl for international aid,” noted Filipino Express in New Jersey. “Here is the bitter math of greed multiplied by official myopia.”

Citizens must insist that reforms, long ignored by officials, be finally undertaken. Lack of preparedness, by national and local governments, has been criminal. Nobody again should die because officials were slack.

Aside from vigilante killings, a water crisis and foreign debts, the outgoing Osmeña regime is leaving Cebuanos unprepared for Ondoy-style floods.

Vice Mayor Mike Rama should get Cebu’s stakeholders to take a good hard look at this inherited time bomb.

“Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done,” George Bernard Shaw once wrote.

(juanlmercado@gmail)