Flood of corruption?

At the height of the torrential downpour last Wednesday afternoon, I went to the fourth level of the parking building of our condo to take a look at how the Marikina River was doing. It was flowing faster than usual and the water level overflowed ankle deep along the walkway on our side of the riverbank. And the usual dark color of the river’s water is now brown, indicating serious erosion of topsoil upriver.

There were runaway barges in danger of damaging bridges. The barges are used to carry the garbage being removed during dredging operations to clean and deepen the river. During the summer months, the river stinks. Apparently, there is just too much filth to clean to make a real difference.

On C-5 in front of the condo, there was the usual street flooding that somehow has avoided a solution through the years. That is obviously a dirty or clogged drainage problem, something MMDA is supposed to be responsible for. But what can honestly be expected from the MMDA?

I called a former DPWH secretary whom I knew to be one of the more productive ones. He told me that his first experience with flooding brought him out to inspect pumping stations and see for himself what the problem was. He said to his surprise, one pumping station had very little water. So, he investigated and found that the esteros as well as the drainage pipes feeding it were clogged with garbage.

That’s nothing new to many of us. I remember Geny Lopez visiting one such pumping station when the Lopezes were running Maynilad. He was so surprised to see a refrigerator and a bed mattress among other pretty large chunks of garbage floating toward the pumping station. The ex-DPWH secretary said he saw the same sort of things too.

I asked him why we are still having floods despite the hundreds of billions of pesos we have spent and continue to spend to control flooding. He said flood infrastructure is just one thing. The more important thing is cleaning the esteros and maintaining the flood-control infrastructure. He did that for the rest of his time at DPWH and things improved but the annual loss of work days seems unavoidable.

He cautioned that cleaning the outlets and esteros will not prevent flooding but it will make the flood water flow faster to Manila Bay. Also, existing outflows may no longer be sufficient to convey the bigger volume of rain water due to climate change.

So, here we are, continuing to throw ever bigger money at the flooding problem. Sen. Francis Escudero last year scrutinized the DPWH’s P255-billion flood control budget. Escudero noted that the DPWH’s flood control budget is far bigger than the capital outlay budget of the Department of Agriculture at P40.13 billion and of the Department of Health at P24.57 billion.

“Flood control even beat our railway budget by over a P100 billion. Railway budget is only P153 billion and irrigation at P31 billion,” Escudero said.

The senator said DPWH’s P255-billion flood control budget even eclipsed proposed budgets of entire departments – P232.2 billion for the Department of National Defense, P209.9 billion for the Department of Social Welfare and Development, P181.4 billion for the Department of Agriculture and its attached agencies, among others. The DPWH has a proposed 2024 budget of P822.2 billion.

“If we are spending more for draining water and dredging rivers than for planting food, then what is the justification for this?” Escudero asked.

Senate majority leader Joel Villanueva said that the DPWH has a “daily budget for flood management” of P1.079 billion in 2023.

“I don’t think any one of the 200,000 families submerged in waters would say they benefited from the P1.079-billion budget. Are we really implementing this? P1.079 billion every single day? What the heck is going on?” Villanueva said during the August 9, 2023 Senate hearing.

Could it be that the flood-control budget is the biggest racket in Congress? Could they be chopping that up into pork barrel funding which is why we see little or no positive effects from such a gargantuan budget? There are rumors that the kickback in pork projects of this type now exceeds 50 percent.

At this rate, Pinoys will just have to be resilient, meaning be resigned to suffering this problem yearly because they keep on voting crocodiles into office.

Remember Provident Village in Marikina? I was told by a former Marikina top official that the problem last week was the same as in the past. But this time, the residents were prepared. They have taken steps like building additional floors to their houses. Some moved out at the first sign of trouble from the dark clouds of habagat.

Still, the former official said they did very badly. Yet politicians are claiming that the dredging they did allowed for a lower level of flooding despite the Ondoy level of rainfall. The reality is that the flood-control projects are not yet complete. They have chopped up the dike projects to different contractors but progress is as slow as the payments.

There was this video on Facebook and X showing different types of aircraft parked in the flooded NAIA tarmac. I would guess this is also a serious drainage problem because the Parañaque River is also filled with garbage and the proposed Parañaque spillway is still a proposal. The new NAIA management will have to address NAIA’s flooding when they take over. I am sure San Miguel is now planning how to solve it. After they dredged the Tullahan River, their Polo Brewery no longer flooded.

What hit us last week was the effect of a flood of corruption and incompetence in carrying out our flood-control projects. Looks like the bank accounts of some politicians are also being flooded with our money.

Boo Chanco’s email address is [email protected]. Follow him on X @boochanco.