‘Pinatubo problem still with us’
CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—Fear and exhaustion showed on the face of Anita Tiamzon, 73, an hour after she, her three daughters-in-law and three granddaughters escaped the rising, strong current in Barangay San Pedro Cutud in the City of San Fernando on Aug. 7.
“I was packing our things, but the water quickly rose by about 2 p.m. I had no choice but tell my kin to walk fast toward the city proper,” Tiamzon told the Inquirer after she and her brood settled in one of the off-road vehicles that had penetrated the waist-deep flood.
The water that swamped San Pedro Cutud, as well as Barangays Sta. Lucia, San Nicolas, Sto. Niño and San Juan, overflowed from the San Fernando-Sto. Tomas-Minalin tail dike, said engineer Marni Castro, a consultant to the city government. The dike breached at around 8 a.m. that day,
“This is rather unusual,” Castro said, noting that even without storms, southwest monsoons (habagat) were strong enough to whip severe rains that submerged the Pampanga capital.
Water spread toward Sto. Tomas and Minalin towns, which had not experienced heavy floods in recent years.
The inundation was expected to cover wide areas. The tail dike was being filled from its eastern and southern sections; the San Fernando River takes in water from the Abacan River in Angeles City and Gugu River inside the FVR Megadike.
Like coffee with cream or milk, the water carried lahar that Mount Pinatubo spewed out in its 1991 eruptions and which the rains washed down.
Tiamzon was overwhelmed: no flood of this scale had submerged the capital in the last 17 years. Still, she uttered loud prayers, thanking God that it was still no match to the lahar flows that swallowed the southern villages of San Fernando on Oct. 1, 1995.
That night, her neighbors and hundreds more families in Sta. Lucia and San Nicolas survived by staying on rooftops or swimming to two-story houses.
By Thursday, it was all too clear that the disasters on Aug. 7 and Oct. 1, 1995, were interconnected.
Drainage
“The Pinatubo problem is still with us,” San Fernando Mayor Oscar Rodriguez said in a meeting with officials of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
Drainage in the tail dike would have worked efficiently had the Gugu River not taken in so much water and lahar, he said. Completed in 1997, the dike was meant to catch sediments from what was once the Gugu Creek.
The structure was a secondary sand pocket below the FVR Megadike, a 56-kilometer, U-shaped dike designed to trap the five million cubic meters of lahar from Porac town. The DPWH spent P6 billion to build and strengthen the megadike.
But Rodriguez said uncontrolled sand quarrying at the eastern side of the megadike trained the Gugu River to flow through the tail dike instead of the Pasig-Potrero River.
“Everything that we have been trying to avoid and which our government had solved through the FVR Megadike is happening now due to lack of maintenance,” Rodriguez said.
To save lives, property and investments, Rodriguez said the priority should be clearing heavily silted waterways draining toward Manila Bay.
