A DAY after the city gets a sudden sampling of ugly flood after last Sunday’s (Sept. 1) downpour, the Cebu City Government created the Inter-Agency Task Force on Flooding (IATFF). Talk about water as the great leveler.
At the helm of this task force will be June Maratas, head of the City’s General Services Office. Other members of the task force are former councilor Jose Daluz III, special assistant to the mayor; Acting City Treasurer Jerone Castillo; Kenneth Enriquez of the City’s Department of Engineering and Public Works (DEPW); and Department of Public Works and Highways Cebu City District Engineer Florida Nuñez.
“I constrained to create this IATFF to immediately make an evaluation, a study for this flood control program both of the City and DPWH so that there will be no overlapping and there will be coherence,” Cebu City Mayor Edgardo Labella said.
The City has at her disposal a flood control fund of P1.5 billion, which the previous administration did not use.
Nuñez, on the other hand, said the DPWH 7 has an ongoing P1.7 billion flood control project in Cebu City. The project focuses on the Butuanon River and the waterway that cuts through Barangay Tejero. We don’t know how much strides had taken place in which parts, but we do know the ugly heap of trash and murk that get hauled up into the streets at the slightest volume of rainwater.
Last Sunday, a number of areas in the city were badly inundated. Floodwater in N. Bacalso Ave., at the approach of the Mambaling flyover, water rose waist-deep, leaving smaller cars throttling to a halt. There was no help, except from bystanders who promptly pushed the dead cars to safer corners. The same is true in MJ Cuenco Ave., flood-prone area since time immemorial. No light at the end of the tunnel, to mix metaphors.
So far, we only hear two solutions: One, dredging, manual and by heavy equipment; and two, widening, which is what the DEPW plans to do on the Estero Parian, from a width of 4.5 to 10.5 meters, enough to hold a deluge anytime of the day.
The IATFF will convene tomorrow, Sept. 5 and Friday, Sept. 6. It will be high occasion for the DEPW and the DPWH 7 to compare their drainage master plans, although we don’t know what “master” means if there are versions of it.