Flood victims expect bleak Christmas

Like most farmers in this rice-producing town, Rose Palazuelo won’t be expecting a merry Christmas this year.

Her 1-hectare rice land was submerged following the flooding that hit the town and nearby areas early this month, destroying newly planted crops or ruining paddies.

“The flooding washed away whatever we had planted in our farms. Rice sprouts were soaked and rotted. We already incurred expenses in our land preparations and everything went to waste,” Palazuelo said.

“Do you think we could still celebrate Christmas with that?” she added.

Residents and their officials have blamed the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) for the unusually heavy flooding on November 15, saying the shoddy job of desilting and widening of a 1.9-kilometer portion of the Anibongan Creek only aggravated the flooding.

Work in the creek, which traverses the villages of Mabaus, Salvacion and Ising in Carmen and parts of Braulio Dujali town before draining into the Davao Gulf, had to be halted due to intermittent rains, according to Cornelio Bautista, NIA district manager.

“Village officials have complained. Instead of dredging the heavily silted waterway, [the NIA] replaced the communal dike with a lower structure, causing the fields and areas to be easily inundated,” Mayor Marcelino Perandos said during a recent consultation with NIA representatives in Barangay (village) Salvacion.

This year alone, Perandos said, Salvacion has experienced three floods, the recent being the worst.

According to the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, some 37,000 people in Carmen were affected by the floods. Damage was placed at P6.4 million in infrastructure and P1.3 million in crops, which included rice and bananas.

Edwin Chavez, another NIA representative, said Salvacion and other creek-side villages traversed are actually flood plains. Desilting was not enough and that the creek should be dredged “which entails a huge amount,” he said.

“These areas naturally receive floodwaters from the upstream Tibal-og (in Sto. Tomas). A little amount of rain could readily inundate rice lands in these places,” Chavez said.

Jorge Diocares, a councilor in Salvacion, said the flooding problem has become a headache for farmers, but the NIA has done little to find an effective solution. “What the locals really wanted was desilting and construction of protective dikes throughout the course of the creek,” he said. Frinston L. Lim, Inquirer Mindanao