Saturday, September 15, 2007 Editorials: City Hall’s response to floods
THE rainy season was officially ushered in months ago and yet Cebu City Government officials are talking like they are still preparing for its coming.
Public officials, however, only gets animated after the fact, which in this case was the flooding that killed a 71-year-old woman and damaged some P15 million in property.
Mayor Tomas Osmeña immediately said he will create a task force that will deal with flooding while City Hall has earmarked P30 million to repair infrastructure damage.
Talks about relocating people living near riverbanks are also being revived, like city officials always do when rivers swell during torrential rains and kill people.
Construction of mini-dikes was even mentioned to address what has long been obvious: water from the mountain areas contribute to the heavy flooding in the lowlands.
Anarchy
In the end, however, the issue on flooding is rooted in the same flaw in governance that bedevils the Banilad-Talamban traffic mess, which is lack of foresight.
Linked to that is failure to draft a master plan and to realize promises.
Allowing anarchy to reign always results either in gridlock or tragedies.
Neglect
It is only now, for example, that city planners talked about dispersing growth that has in the past years been concentrated in the Ban-Tal area or the northern barangays.
And with the recent flooding, city officials are again talking about clearing up the riverbanks after years of neglect and failure to stop the sprouting of shanties there.
Dikes? That idea would have been laughable had natural waterways not been constricted by illegal structures or blocked altogether by the construction of subdivisions.
Master plan
This is not to say that city officials do not know this; it’s just that they are not aggressively tackling the problem because of either incompetence or politicking.
Of course, overly stressing the what-should-been won’t be productive if lessons remain in the realm of talk and will not be used to guide the action of officials.
Creating a task force to deal with flooding, for example, is good only if the task force follows an overall drainage plan and does not do things blindly.
