Rizal towns still flooded weeks after monsoon rains

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—It’s business as usual in these places— except for the flooding.

Residents in several areas in municipalities in the Rizal province can’t walk on streets without getting wet even more than a month after the southwest monsoon rains that caused heavy flooding and affected thousands of families hit the country.

Anton Stanley of the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Management Office told the Inquirer that street water resulting from the heavy rains on Aug. 7 has, up to now, remained “stagnant” in some places in municipalities near the Laguna Lake.

These municipalities include Baras, Jala-jala, Cardona, Pililla, Morong, Taytay and Binangonan, among others.

In the Taytay Floodway in Taytay, floodwaters reach just below the knee, according to Stanley.

In Binangonan, he said that all 40 barangay (villages) except Pilapila and Bangad were still flooded.

According to Stanley, there is too much water in these areas that the drainage system could not just “sip it all out.”

He added that water from the Laguna Lake, which, he said, has not returned to its normal level of 12.5 meters from the bottom, was also another cause of the continued flooding.

Asked what the provincial government would do, Stanley said that it would just wait, since it was “normal” for the floodwaters to subside slowly in these areas.

“When ‘Ondoy’ was here (in 2009), we had to wait for more than two months (for the floodwaters to subside). Hopefully, within this month (the floodwaters will go down),” he said.