Stop the floods

Cebu City Councilor Margot Osmeña said the proposed P200-million allocation for drainage improvement projects in the city’s supplemental budget no. 2 needs to be scrutinized to ensure that the outlays are in line with the city’s drainage master plan.

Her  passion for prudent spending of taxpayers’ money is laudable and will bear good fruit if she and her colleagues  coordinate with officials in the city’s executive branch to update the  plan.

A month ago, engineer June Nadine Sison of the city’s Department of Engineering and Public Works  pointed out that the  seven-year-old master plan needs updating and was  not sufficient to stop floods.

If Sison was merely theorizing, last Sunday’s torrential rains wouldn’t have caused severe flooding especially in Cebu City’s downtown and North Reclamation areas since nearly 70 percent of projects under the current master plan was supposedly completed.

We haven’t seen a convincing audit of those accomplishments, but granting some or most were undertaken, the measures fell short indeed.

Canals and culverts remain inadequate for the volume of storm water that gushes through the city. The  few gabion mini-dams  installed in the hinterlands are just as impotent.

The no. 1 recommendation of the master plan –  the removal of obstructions, human and man-made,  in rivers and creeks, including their three-meter easement— refer to unfinished tasks, plain as the eye can see.

No one has really enforced  Cebu City Ordinance 2103, which requires  lot owners  to build cisterns  to hold rainwater. If these storage measures were in place in 1998 when the ordinance was passed, we wouldn’t be cursing flash floods today or panicking when El Niño delivers a scorching summer.

At the rate Cebu City is pouring concrete on every flat surface,   topped off with massive flyovers and parking lots,  why are we surprised when  monsoon rains don’t just  sink into the ground?

And then there’s the  rape of the uplands, where tree cover has been stripped for  subdivisions and unregulated urban development  that don’t   give a hoot about ecological sustainability.

Man’s  abuse of nature overwhelms us in our community.

Not even the millions of pesos invested in  detention ponds of  Monterrazas de Cebu, for example, can hold back  runoff water from turning lowland sitios in barangays Guadalupe and Tisa into calamity zones.

Any drainage master plan—and we strenuously call for a revised, comprehensive one—has to take into account the toll of all these  manmade activities.  Until then, we have only ourselves to blame and not the erratic patterns of Mother Nature.