Ready for the next one?

When the creek running parallel to the railroad tracks from Tondo to Sta. Cruz in Manila was still bordered by sampaguita or jasmine bushes instead of shanties, the adjacent streets were regularly submerged in several inches of floodwaters.

This was four decades ago, around the time that a Magnitude 7.3 earthquake flattened the six-story Ruby Tower apartments in Sta. Cruz, Manila, killing 268 residents (the unofficial toll was higher) and leaving 260 others injured.

Manila is flood-prone; geologists have warned that the city is gradually sinking into the sea. There are accounts of heavy flooding dating back to the start of Manila’s recorded history.

A foreigner who has lived here long enough wondered how sound the science was behind apocalyptic warnings about climate change. He told me he clearly remembered Manila and Pangasinan experiencing Ondoy-type flooding at least once, way back in the ’70s.

In the case of earthquakes, there are also historical accounts of major quakes destroying churches and Spanish colonial “bahay na bato” or stone houses.

Natural calamities haven’t changed much over the centuries, but human capability to deal with them has advanced exponentially.

Many of the advances, unfortunately, seem to have passed us by in this country. Our watersheds are also more depleted now, and we tend to ignore even the simplest disaster mitigating measures.

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One of these measures is to keep waterways and drainage systems free of obstruction.

What do we do? We continue indiscriminate garbage disposal, despite knowing full well that even cigarette butts can accumulate and clog drainage, and clogged drains aggravate flooding.

Houses and other structures are built not just along the banks of waterways but right over narrow ones, with no alternative paths built for rainwater to drain into larger bodies of water that lead to the sea.

These days, with shanties standing cheek by jowl right on the creek and on both sides of the railroad tracks in Manila, the average flood in the area can now rise up to a few feet instead of several inches.

Waterways and natural catchments and drainage systems are public property. How are they reclaimed by private developers? This is a failure of local governments, particularly barangay personnel, and the police.

Around Laguna de Bay, government buildings have been built alongside private structures on what is supposed to be a natural floodplain, and a large tract of the lake, now chockfull of fish pens, was reclaimed as a squatter relocation site.

Some experts have warned that because of the way water enters and leaves the lake, taxpayers will simply be throwing away billions on that controversial dredging project – one of the alleged midnight deals in the previous administration – and the water will still spill over into the floodplain in the next Ondoy-type cataclysm.

At least the government has acquired more boats for flood rescue operations. We are told that evacuation systems and facilities have also been upgraded since last year, and warning systems improved including at the dams.

That disaster over the release of dam water in Pangasinan was another case of one step backward for us. I remember swimming in the waters of Bustos in Bulacan in my childhood, with the constant fear that I wouldn’t be able to leave the water quickly enough if the warning siren for the release of dam water rang out. The adults liked to scare us with stories of people being washed away by the rampaging waters, never to be seen again.

I grew up thinking all dams had efficient warning systems. Then last year we were told that in the age of mobile phones, communication lines between the dam management and local government got crossed in Pangasinan, leading to destructive flooding from the release of dam water.

This year the government has reassured us that aside from having better warning systems in place, more Doppler radars for predicting the amount of rainfall have been installed, although there are fewer meteorologists around to interpret the data.

Chief meteorologist Prisco Nilo was publicly berated and then sacked by P-Noy, while former weather bureau spokesman Nathaniel Cruz is now working in Australia (getting the job on his own and not poached by Canberra, the Aussies told me).

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When it comes to earthquakes, we are told that structural engineering has improved all around and real estate developers now install devices to stabilize high-rises when the earth moves. But we are still not fully reassured.

The Ruby Tower quake struck at 4:19 a.m. on Aug. 2, 1968. The search for survivors and the dead took a week, and the disaster led to the creation of the Office of Civil Defense.

Disasters happen, but why was Ruby Tower so badly hit? Then Manila Mayor Antonio Villegas created a 14-member probe body to find out. The panel concluded that the tragedy was “a product of catastrophic combination of poor design, deficient construction and inadequate inspection and supervision.”

But the case was settled and no one went to prison or lost his job over the disaster, and the story receded from the headlines.

Today, how many buildings across the country, which lies in the earthquake-prone Ring of Fire, are also disasters waiting to happen with the “combination of poor design, deficient construction and inadequate inspection and supervision?”

Schools, a hotel in Baguio and other buildings collapsed when a Magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Luzon on July 16, 1990. At least 1,621 people died.

Two decades later, are our buildings sturdier, and are we better prepared for a powerful earthquake? One risk assessment consultancy says we’re not.

Yesterday, on the first anniversary of typhoon Ondoy, Malacañang again reassured the nation that the government is better prepared to deal with a similar disaster.

We’re keeping our fingers crossed.