Helpless

Noah might have lived in Calumpit — except that no one in that town remembers flooding this bad before. Until Sunday, there were communities still beyond the reach of help. The national highway is under water. The resources of local governments are exhausted.

There are many culprits to this calamity.

Some blame the coincidence of high tide and heavy rainfall for the unprecedented flooding. The same coincidence happened before without the severe floods we see now.

Others blame the release of water from the dams, saying that water should have been gradually released days before the heavy rainfall happened. Managers of the dams say they did that, precisely, but the accumulation of water from the storms was just too quick.

There is peril in draining the dams too much; we need the impounded water for power generation and irrigation during the dry months. There is peril in draining the dams too quickly; that causes flooding downstream. There is peril in draining the dams too late; that could invite a dam breaking with such unthinkable consequences.

Still others blame the clogged waterways that failed to drain rainwater into the sea in the most efficient way. If this is the culprit, then government is ultimately responsible for the crime. A program to dredge the waterways ought to have been undertaken long before the rains came.

Those who want to divert blame from the authorities choose to pin it on global warming. If this is so, then we are doomed. There is no sign that global warming is abating. There is every indication we have neither the financial muscle nor the political will to apply the large-scale infrastructure solutions necessary to prevent a repeat of the tragedy we are still dealing with in Central Luzon.

Perhaps the calamity is a combination of all the culprits mentioned above. What that exact combination is, we do not know. Government seems unable to tell us. We have to wait for the experts to eventually make the assessment. Knowing the exact combination of factors explaining this unusual calamity is the precondition for a program to mitigate recurrence of this nightmare.

Meanwhile, all we can do is to throw everything we have into the rescue and relief operation happening in the submerged towns of Bulacan, Pampanga and Nueva Ecija.

It is an operation that had to be mounted in haste — but this should not excuse its haphazard character so far. Volunteers seemed to be spilling into the stricken areas without effective coordination. There were no “ground commanders” to speak of. When the flood did not recede quickly enough, evacuees soon had to be evacuated a second time from imperiled evacuation centers.

When this calamity is finally over, we should remember to demand from the local governments a more effective disaster plan. Clearly, what they had (if any) before the flooding happened was deficient at best. Ask the thousands of victims who starved as they shivered on rooftops.

During the first few days of the calamity, the response from government agencies appeared both meager and confused. When asked when the top-level disaster management council might be convened, the presidential spokesman smugly said it was not yet time. As images of the scale of human calamity filtered through the media, there was also rising criticism of what appeared to be the absence of presidential leadership.

Perhaps stung by the rising criticism, President Aquino finally convened a top-level disaster meeting last Sunday. The entire session was broadcast live, clearly to convince our people that functional presidential leadership was in place.

Maybe the objective was not achieved.

The entire proceeding appeared designed to brief the President. One after the other, officials briefed the President about things most of us already knew: the time and date this and then that typhoon entered the Philippine area of responsibility; the amount of relief goods delivered to the victims; the condition of this or that piece of infrastructure.

The reporting was interrupted only when the presidential mind latched on to some anecdotal detail: Why did the missing fishermen still sail out to sea despite the storm warnings? How long does it take before a landslide gets reported to the DPWH? How come Napolcom-Tarlac donated medicines to the DOH? Why did the seawall along Roxas Boulevard collapse?

I do not recall any of the President’s questions receiving a clear answer from his officials. There was a small disagreement between DPWH Secretary Singson and DOTC Secretary Roxas about whether the overhang of the ill-fated seawall was too long or too short to deflect the waves.

I sort of expected this session would end with a flurry of presidential directives to properly orchestrate the response of the national government to a calamity that grew by the day. I sort of expected firm presidential assurance that rice supply was secure despite the fact that our major rice growing areas were devastated by winds and floods. I half-expected the President to announce a major infrastructure program to protect our rice bowl from this sort of inundation.

Whoever designed this session completely lost sight of its objective as political theater. This session was supposed to convey the image of a chief executive effectively on top of the situation. All the minute details of the presidential briefings could be done in private. In public view, the President is supposed to exert a reassuring presence, whipping his troops into line and leading the charge to save the poor and the dispossessed.

This was supposed to be a stage where presidential decisiveness is demonstrated. Instead, it turned out to be peephole, showing a government swamped by force majeure, nearly helpless against the peril threatening the people, incapable of imagining a path to a safer future.