THE sun actually shone in our place before noon yesterday, which got me into thinking that the rains that have been with us the past few days would finally go away. Less than an hour after, the sky darkened again and rain fell. It wasn’t heavy, but this was the same kind that expands the lifespan of cumulus and nimbus clouds, prolonging our agony. Cebuanos call this “inday-inday.”
In Cagayan de Oro City and Misamis Oriental, the rain was, unlike here, heavy and prolonged last Monday, causing flooding and landslides. The weather bureau Pagasa said about a month’s worth of rain poured within 24 hours in the city This means that even large drainage systems and other ways would not be able to accommodate the falling water.
The overflowing of the waterways caused floods that in some places and in certain instances reached waist deep. The sight of flooded streets prompted the description “waterworld,” from the title of a movie starring Kevin Costner. Cagayan de Oro’s City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office said more than a thousand families have been evacuated.
Cebu is fortunate to have evaded the most telling blow of the weather disturbance spawned by the entry of tropical depression Auring (which eventually weakened into a low pressure area or LPA), and which was followed by two other LPAs. While an LPA is often overlooked for being weaker than a full-blown storm, it can cause disastrous raining.
But we should not wait for a month’s worth of rain to pour in only 24 hours to act on the clogging of our waterways and the perennial problem of informal settlers building structures on so-called danger zones. The administration of former mayor Michael Rama made noise about solving the problem by launching the so-called Project Redz (Reduction of Danger Zones) but it didn’t fly. Weeks after, Project Redz was forgotten.
In October last year, heavy rain fell on some parts of Cebu for more than an hour because of the presence of a weather system called the inter-tropical convergence zone (ICTZ) causing flooding in low-lying areas. That was when officials of the weather bureau Pagasa in Cebu urged local government officials to speed up the implementation of their drainage action plans in anticipation of more rainfalls. Nothing came out of it because the weather got better.
At that time, a local paper published a report that had Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña reiterating his proposal to construct temporary water retention ponds or drainage holes to battle flash floods. He said then that he was planning to hire a technical staff to study the possibility of putting a five-story drainage hole under the football field of the Cebu City Sports Center and under the Fuente Osmeña circle.
The construction of retention ponds is an accepted flood mitigation project in other countries and was pushed by former Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) secretary Rogelio Singson. So Osmeña’s plan was okay, but nothing much also came out of it. Meanwhile, other local government officials didn’t even come up with drainage action plans.
In the meantime, Pagasa is again warning of more rains.