Fire and rain

As we watch the skies each time a rainstorm breaks, we wonder if it will bring a flash flood in the city or rural communities.

Despite the wet season, fire incidents occur without warning. The Cebu City Fire Department says the usual culprit is an electrical overload or untended cooking fire.

Water and fire, in deadly proportions, are serving up a disturbing prelude to 2012 as the Year of the Water Dragon, said to be  a period worth looking forward to for possibilities of fortune according to some Chinese feng shui experts.

But geomancers don’t define destiny; people do.

Typhoon Sendong begs the question: How prepared is Cebu City and province for a disaster? To tease an answer out of that, Nature sent another wake up call last Monday with unceasing rains that caused the Canasaga River to overflow.

The town was the worst-hit area. Unprecedented flooding  turned sitio Laray in barangay Pitogo, Consolacion town, into a fishpond for 500 now-displaced families.

In Cebu City and Mandaue City, low-lying areas and many streets were again underwater.

The Dec. 23 fire that burned down Gaisano Capital South in Colon Street and threw 800 people out of work renewed an old question: How prepared is the city’s fire department to handle a high-rise inferno?

Judging from the fire department’s 10 aging firetrucks, four of which conked out from battle fatigue after attacking the Gasiano blaze, not very.  Their  aerial ladder can only extend to five storys.

What’s most disturbing is the discovery that a P50 million outlay proposed in the 2011 budget to purchase equipment and improve fire stations was scratched by the City  Council.

Last Tuesday, the heavens dumped 185.4 mm of rainfall in Cebu,  almost four times what’s normally expected in a day’s quota of 50 mm in the wet months of November to January, according to the weather bureau.

Shall we blame Mother Nature or our own lack of foresight?

The deluge reminded us all over again of the near-Ondoy disaster Metro Cebu faced in Jan. 25, when above-normal rainfall triggered flash floods in places that never went under before.

The time for delaying action on a Cebu City Drainage Master Plan and the discipline of a Land Use Plan is over.

Neither should we waste more time in modernizing the Cebu City Fire Department.