The floods are more horrifyingly real than imagined

Every time dark clouds are forming, many Metro Cebu residents get apprehensive. Some families went thru the terrible experience of unprecedented floods wrecking havoc in their homes one week ago. Live radio reports, TV video footages and newspaper accounts detailed the sufferings of the flood victims. In my case alone, waters inundated our residence that Saturday evening. It had never happened in the last four decades of our stay at Villa Aurora that we got flooded.

It took 10 men to help us cleanse our house of the debris hours after the thunderstorm finally stopped. I was lucky I could get hold of Junior Laborera and friends of Panagdait and Michael Manaloto's workers to provide the necessary muscle.

While we were cleaning the muck away, I recalled having written in this column, quite a number of times, on the need to dredge our esteros and rivers. My suggestion included a bitter pill to swallow for some informal settlers dwelling along our waterways, but, clearing their structures was one way to allow waters to flow freely, all in the interest of a greater majority. Really, I thought the problem was that simple to solve.

Culling from that Saturday's trauma, I realized that the urgent need of our city is an infrastructure that is a thousand times more massive than my uneducated mind could comprehend. Indeed, the problem is not as simple as I earlier imagined.  The City Engineer Kenneth Enriquez, in a very enlightening presentation, showed the enormity of the works needed to absorb the growing volume of the kind of rainwaters climate change has recently spawned. An incredibly huge sum of money, in billions of pesos, is what the city needs.

Where can we get this fund? In the few early years of this millennium, the city obtained a loan, also billions of pesos, to do what is now known as the South Road Properties. All city taxpayers have paid for this project as we continue to do so. No one will question that this SRP is where taxpayers' money was, is and will continue to be invested in. It is about time that the city administration gives to us the return of our investment.

Not very long ago, the Sanggunian Panlungsod, approved Ordinance No. 2332, that was, in my mind, aimed at crippling His Honor, Cebu City Mayor Michael L. Rama. The council, in mostly self-serving superfluity, put up a kind of red flag against all entities who desired to buy a space of the SRP warning them from dealing with the mayor. Of course, the hidden agenda was to reserve the disposition of the asset until the return of their political demigod.

Now that the Cebu electorate has spoken, it is a good move for the city council, the majority of whom still belong to the abortive returnee, to repeal that ordinance. They can cite good reasons. First, they may say that anyway, that local law is, as some quarters claim and per their serious study, flawed. It will be more dignifying to them to repeal that ordinance rather than wait for the court to declare its invalidity.

Second, these councilors can put a noble cover to their move. There is no better political move than their admission of the urgent need to sell portions of the SRP to generate a large fund to finance the infrastructure the city engineer has so competently discussed.  Wow!

Third, they minimize the impact of the news that the mayor is out of the country to receive formal offer by some foreign investors to buy a piece of the SRP. It will become the mayor's huge advertisement billboard, when he comes home with more details on this plausible deal, especially if he declares that the realizable fund is going to be spent on city's drainage projects. If the councilors belonging to the group called BOPK put in the council agenda the repeal of Ordinance No. 2332, they can share with the mayor's ratings.

And then, when we see the realization of the anti-flood project, we may no longer fret each time dark clouds form.