THEY say that during the devastating Ondoy visit in Luzon, it rained in a few hours in volumes of water normally equivalent to rain in one month.

“Ang kinaiyahan nasuko na gyud!” a cab driver shared his thoughts with me, like he had to talk to someone, or.

But was it God’s hand, or man’s own neglect?

My memory of Manila is a picture of flooding. It was a problem that perhaps was not fully attended to, something people just got used to.

Sun.Star accepts donations for victims of Typhoon Ondoy

In school when it was rainy season, we walked out of the classroom and waded in the flood in the street back of UST to hail for a jeep ride home to Taft Ave. No wet days ever surprised us. In raincoats, we would walk under the rain with the water going up our legs almost half way to our knees. To catch a jeep, my friends and I walked right in the middle of the road, careful not to fall into manholes we could not see. Once or twice, I had to wade in dirty water in high heels, on my way home from a party.

During the wet ‘ber’ months, the picture was clear every day at the end of classes in the late afternoon: we’d walk in the flood to the jeepney stop.

In 1972, I stayed in a subdivision in Pasay which was on a slight rise from the level of the street. When a storm came and stayed around for a couple of days’ blasting, non-stop rain, Metro Manila was inundated in most places. From the subdivision, we watched small bancas pass by over the inundated road just outside our gate.

A kid would ask, “Why does it flood, Ma?”

Metro Manila, among other places at the NCR, came under water last week like it never did before.

But every Manilan knows the city is open to Manila Bay in the west, and Laguna Lake in the southeast. The river systems include the Malabon-Tenejeros-Tullahan River, also the Pasig-Marikina river.

In a sense, the Metro is, as an environmental historian puts it, “a vast urbanized drainage basin.” It’s what is called a floodplain, or an area over which rivers flood for a time, but not to stay, according to an interesting study.

Metro Manila is flooded 18 to 20 times every year.

But are we listening?

How about garbage, where’d you put your garbage?

Besides a few improvements on the water system, I suppose there are still the esteros grandma used to talk about, great in their time but not now. And there are 12 modern cities and 5 bustling towns in the Metro, ten times bigger in population size since 1939, pressing on the need for an effective drainage system, among other needs.

There’s the scramble for food and the fear of epidemics after Ondoy.

Of course, the Ondoy flood could still have been worse. But we’re also still luckier than we think, if you consider how the tsunami came to Samoa.

Environmental scientists cite a flood in ancient times that happened in the area of the Black Sea and affected much of the then known world. This was in 5600 BCE. The rain is described like ten cubic miles of water coming down each day, or 200 times that water falls each day in the Niagara Falls. A total of 60,000 square miles of land went under water, the Black Sea shoreline was expanded, the water level was raised by hundreds of feet.

This flood could have been the source of many of the flood stories in history, it sent people running farther away from Europe, to the Near East, also to Egypt.

Floods were terrible even after. Some nations got luckier than others.

In its history, China has experienced three deadliest floods. The overflow of China’s Yellow River (Huang He) killed over 500,000 people in 1938. But worse than this, earlier in a 1931 overflow, two million people died.

Water in our life is a blessing and a curse. We have clean water and dirty water, a quick, treacherous splash or a quiet flow. It’s our choice---where we live or how we live.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)