EDITORIAL - Accusing fingers do not solve floods

First they blamed plastic bags and indiscriminate throwing of garbage for the perennial floods that seem to bug Cebu City and outlying areas each time there is a heavy rain. Now they are blaming the encroachment on easements along the esteros. The readiness with which the government seems to blame everything and everyone else for the problem but its own self is the best indicator that it is the problem.

Floods are natural occurrences. They have been happening since the beginning of time. They have been happening long before populations exploded and governments were set up. In other words, floods happen whether we like it or not. But it is up to government, which is the embodiment of the people in a civilized world, to find the means to cope with floods.

To cope with floods, the government needs to understand the problem instead of taking the convenient way out, which is to blame everything and everyone else. So before it launches into its favorite blame game, it needs to first ask its own self what it has done about the problem and whether what it may have been doing is sufficient to solve it.

The city, through the barangays, has admittedly been quite aggressive in its efforts toward minimizing indiscriminate throwing of garbage. And it has taken steps to minimize the use of plastic bags. Pretty soon it may enforce laws on easement along esteros and other waterways. But as sure as the sun rises in the east, all these efforts will not solve flooding for the simple reason that they are not the solution to the problem.

The government needs to understand that many areas are flood-prone not because people in these areas use plastic bags and throw their garbage indiscriminately or that they encroach on esteros but because these areas simply happen to be more low-lying than others. These areas get flooded even if the sun is up over them for the simple reason that it rained heavily somewhere else and the water, seeking its own level, just found their way there.

Clearly it is not a matter of blaming the usual suspects like plastic bags, garbage and esteros (by the way, there are too few esteros in the city to be the real culprit). What the city needs to be looking into is whether its drainage system is adequate to meet the problem, which because of global climate changes, is only bound to get worse.

 But drainage has never been a priority of government. What drainage projects get undertaken are pathetically inadequate. For a city that is so flood-prone, its biggest concrete canals are only two feet deep and a foot wide. Culverts never exceed two meters? In world class cities, which we like to pretend we are, they have what they call storm drainage that can swallow even ships. Here we only have accusing fingers.