Tuesday, August 21, 2007 Tantingco: Why Pampanga will always get floods By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
THE lesson we never learn and the fact that we always choose to ignore is that Pampanga sits on a floodplain. The sooner we accept this, the better for all of us.
Our province is the worst place to be in during the rainy season, because it's located right there in the drainage system of Luzon Island -- the Pampanga River Basin -- where floodwaters from Nueva Vizcaya, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Aurora, Tarlac, Bulacan and the eastern side of the Zambales Mountain Range and the western side of the Sierra Madre, converges and stays in a depression called the Candaba Swamp, before emptying into the Manila Bay.
On the map, the province looks like a human heart enveloped by a web of arteries, veins and capillaries -- actually hundreds of rivers, rivulets, streams, brooks and canals that make the delta the most fertile on Luzon Island.
This is the reason the ancient settlers and the subsequent colonizers came and stayed here, and the reason they named the place Pampanga (from the word pampang, "riverbanks").
Once upon a time, Pampanga (and Luzon) was under the sea. The active tectonic plate pushed it up but sometime in 3000 BC, the sea level rose by several meters, turning the central plain into swampland. The Zambales Mountain Range and Mount Arayat probably looked like islands and Porac was a shoreline.
This theory is supported by the discovery of a large prehistoric settlement high up on a plateau in Hacienda Dolores, Porac -- an unlikely place because communities this size usually thrive near large bodies of water. Archaeologists have also recently unearthed seashells in Guagua, Lubao and other interior towns.
The sea receded to where it is today because the whole tectonic plate on which Luzon Island sits continues to rise, and also because Mount Pinatubo dumped prehistoric lahar on its western side, reclaiming land from the sea and forming a land mass that would later be known as Pampanga. This siltation process occurred long before the Spaniards came; it occurred again a few years ago, after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo.
Soon, however, the process will be reversed and Pampanga will again slide back into the sea. A phenomenon called subsidence causes the land to compress and sink under its own weight; it's a natural process that's hastened by too many artesian wells pumping too much underground water out. This empties the porous layers below and the result is compaction of the soil above them. Scientists say that the sign that subsidence is already happening is that the floods are deeper and stay around longer.
And so this is where we Kapampangans have chosen to build our province in -- between the devil and the deep blue sea, where the volcano keeps pushing the sea back and the sea keeps pulling the land right back. Pampanga is the battleground of these two geological forces -- siltation versus subsidence -- and the floods are the indicators of who is winning.
Our ancestors had already imagined their land being in the crossfire between two warring deities, Namalyari (Mount Pinatubo) and Sinukuan (Mount Arayat), but they got the second combatant wrong: Namalyari's nemesis is the sea, not Sinukuan.
To illustrate this phenomenon further, take the case of Bacolor, once the capital of not only Pampanga but also the Philippines. Its prehistoric name was Bakulud, from the ancient Kapampangan word makabakulud ("elevated"). The reason the first prehistoric settlers called it Bakulud was that the town really stood on higher ground than its surroundings. Then a prehistoric eruption of Mount Pinatubo (the one that occurred 600 years ago) dumped lahar on the surrounding areas, which made them more elevated than Bakulud. This was the Bakulud that the Spaniards found in 1571, which they eventually renamed Bacolor. And so when Pinatubo erupted again in 1991, the see-saw effect continued and lahar flowed to the lower area (Bacolor), and so today, once again, Bacolor is makabakulud, "elevated."
Kapampangans should learn not to resist flooding, but to embrace it and live with it, because no matter what we do, it will always happen and it will always prevail. Prehistoric Kapampangans knew this so they built their houses on stilts, used rivers instead of roads as highways, took boats instead of horses, alternated as farmers and fishermen and converted their farmlands into fishponds during floods.
When the Spaniards came and reoriented our systems, we lost our intimacy with rivers and suddenly, flood was our enemy. History is full of accounts of catastrophic floods: Macabebe (1683), Minalin (1769, 1833, 1869), Candaba (1815, 1832, 1839, 1871), Bacolor (1831, 1881, 1887, 1890), San Luis (1872, 1884, 1885, 1886), Apalit (1846), Angeles (1796, 1850, 1881, 1885, 1919). Many towns relocated to their present sites as a result of flooding (Minalin from Sta. Maria, Macabebe; Mexico from San Jose Matulid; Lubao from Sta. Cruz; Concepcion and Magalang from Macapsa and San Bartolome). Today we continue to suffer from floods because we've not heeded the wisdom that our prehistoric ancestors passed on to us. We foolishly build giant malls on swamplands, plush subdivisions on old riverbeds, factories on riverbanks, streets on canals. Instead of letting the water flow straight towards the sea, we build dikes to redirect the river, as if we knew how the river should flow more than the river itself.
We also insult our rivers by making them receptacles of our wastes and excrement. Our ancestors bathed and fished in the river and built their houses facing the water; we, on the other hand, turned our houses around and dropped everything we didn't need anymore right into the river.
Planners, developers, engineers and government officials should desist from altering the waterways crisscrossing the entire length of the province because, well, God put them here precisely to provide quick and easy exit routes for the floods of Central Luzon and the lahars of Pinatubo.
Kapampangans were, are and will always be, people of the riverbanks. The river is where we shaped our history and discovered our destiny. I am sure the river is where we shall also find our redemption.
References: Dr. Fernando Siringan, UP National Institute for Geological Sciences (NIGS); Dr. Wilhelm C. Solheim II, University of the Philippines; Mariano Henson, The Province of Pampanga and its Towns; Brigido Corpuz and Edgar Rosero, eds, Kalamidad, Rebolusyon, Kabayanihan: Mga Kahulugan Nito sa Kasalukuyang Panahon; Robby Tantingco, "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," Singsing Magazine Vol. 3 No. 2.
