Wanted: Disaster resilient communities

Over the weekend, I went to Lapu-Lapu City for two straight days, first for the media appreciation dinner hosted by the Shangri-La Hotels operating in the Philippines, then I had to huff over to the Maribago Blue Water for their Food Street events. The next day we had dinner in White Sands Resort with former Defense Secretary Gilbert “Gibo” Teodoro Jr. and his wife Nikki. As it was dark, as we drove near the bend that leads to the beach resorts, I almost hit a little boy who was practically standing in the middle of the road. Good thing I swerved just in time.

It turned out that the little boy had no other choice, because half the road was clogged with rainwater and the mindless owners of the establishments beside it placed a stack of old tires to prevent vehicles from splashing into their building. Clearly what is happening there is a serious clogged drainage or worse, there’s just no drainage at all!

I understand that Lapu-Lapu City Mayor Paz Radaza is proposing a P1 billion budget for the year 2011, which is almost 20% higher than last year. First of all, I hope that she gets the budget she is requesting the City Council, but most important of all, I hope that she included in that budget increase fixing the drainage on the areas I mentioned. Come now, it is very easy to come up with the lame excuse that the city doesn’t want to spend money on the national road. But like it or not, what’s happening there endangers the lives of the residents of Lapu-Lapu City, which in my book should be Mayor Radaza higher priority; plus the fact that these roads lead to the tourist areas of Mactan. I hope Mayor Radaza reads and listens to good advice, even if it is unsolicited.

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I was in the Understanding Choices Forum at the Bryant George Hall of the Eduardo Aboitiz Development Studies Center (EADS) of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation, Inc. (RAFI) last Friday to attend the “Disaster-Resilient Communities in a Changing Climate” forum. Aside from Camotes Vice-Mayor Alfredo A. Arquillano who spoke about what he has done in San Francisco, Camotes, the other principal speaker was an old friend Mr. Illac Diaz, founder of the My Shelter Foundation. I interviewed him on Feb.14, 2005 when he talked about a novel idea of building homes from the earth.

Illac Diaz is a man searching for a better life for our people, by offering novel, innovative, albeit sometimes old solutions to the same problems that plague our country everyday. I like his approach in the sense that whenever you get to attend a forum on Climate Change, chances are, the speakers are still telling us or warning us of this global problem and he is right. Our speaker for our Rotary Club of Cebu last Thursday, environmental lawyer Gloria Estenzo Ramos did exactly that, tell her audience of the problems of global warming or climate change.

But Illac Diaz doesn’t want to tell us what we already know about Climate Change, rather he is offering solutions to make us able to cope up with our present reality. First, we live in a tropical climate, which means we only have wet or dry seasons. Second, we must accept that while Cebu may not be directly under the typhoon belt, but whenever there are big typhoons, we do get our fair share of strong winds and rains. Hence, Mr. Diaz says we should plan our lives with the problems that visit us year after year after year and I can’t say that I disagree with him.

This is exactly what I wrote in an article last week about the use of asphalt versus cement, which is very abundant in Cebu, while we have to import the bitumen for the asphalt. When I was running the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management (CITOM) I found out that the road from Beverly Glen towards Friendship St. doubled as a creek or drainage in the valley. Hence, the City of Cebu always fixes this road at least twice a year.

I requested then Councilor Gabby Leyson to cement this road. He budgeted it in 2003 and was finished within a year. Seven years later, the cemented road remains sturdy so the City of Cebu has saved a lot of money, which could be used to fix other roads. Mayor Michael Rama rang me up to tell me that he agreed with my idea. I just hope that he’d do this in Juana Osmeña St., which is the heaviest used secondary road.

Illac Diaz then showed us a model of a school he constructed using empty plastic softdrinks bottles filled with earth. It proved so sturdy that an SUV ran over one bottle and it couldn’t break it. In short, what Illiac Diaz is telling us is to build Disaster-Resilient communities, from buildings, homes and roads, something we should have done decades ago. This means, our urban planners, architects and designers must come up with novel designs or old ones, like what Illac demonstrated to us how the Spanish built sturdy churches. So are we ready to be disaster resilient? I think we have no choice!