THE flooding in Barangay Basak in Lapu-Lapu City shows how our inadequacies are continuing to hound and inconvenience us. Of course, Basak or Lapu-Lapu City is not alone in this one because almost all local government units, especially in Metro Cebu, have areas where these inadequacies are most pronounced.
Photographs of how people in Basak are coping with the flood have circulated not only in social media but also in traditional media. In one photo, an orange plastic boat could be seen ferrying customers to and from a mall whose front area was taken over by a brown lake. A photo by Sun.Star Cebu's Alan Tancawan showed boys ferrying students on a makeshift raft.
To provide an immediate solution, Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza directed the other day the Clean and Green Office to drain the water to a nearby drainage using a water pump. Unfortunately, rain fell again yesterday and the weather might not improve following the entry of typhoon Marce in the Philippines’ area of responsibility. And rain will continue to hound us this November, according to Pagasa.
The flooded area in Basak, according to Radaza, can't be reached by the drainage system because it is at the lower level. Why the situation in Basak was not considered when the drainage system was laid down could be a result of the haphazard manner local government units implement flood mitigation measures. But Band-Aid solutions do not work especially with the effects of climate change.
Government officials, more often than not, merely pay lip service to the task of improving the drainage systems in their jurisdictions. Some of them explain their inaction by citing the high cost of such undertaking. But there should be other creative ways to deal with the problem. Worse is when government officials simply refuse to do something because of either incompetence or sloth.
Generally, the attitude has been to not deal with the problem when the weather is good. How many local government units implemented major flood-mitigating when we were hit by El Niño for several months? Now we are experiencing the inconvenience resulting from the lackadaisical approach to the problem.
We do not think things will change immediately, though. For example, expect government officials to relax again once the floods subside and the sky clears.