When it rains, it floods

The other afternoon, traffic ground to a halt along A.S. Fortuna Street in Banilad, Mandaue City particularly the stretch between the intersections of H. Cortes and P. Remedio Streets. The heavy rains poured down without letup beginning at 3:00 p.m. At six p.m. water was reported to be at neck-deep in the flood-prone area near the Rolling Hills funeral parlor. Some vehicles were stalled on the street.

Banilad Barangay Captain Greg Yap, despite the heavy rains and floods, was directing traffic within the area until midnight. In the barangay hall, a family from the Fontanosa compound called to ask for rescue and evacuation as flood waters have already reached the floor of their house. There were also residents who sought shelter from the barangay hall at the height of the flood. It was a good thing that the rains stopped at night and flood waters subsided fast.

Floods are caused by heavy rains that come with tropical storm formed over the warm waters of the ocean which are full of moisture. When the right conditions form, bringing these storms toward land, many inches of rainfall usually occur.

The heavy precipitation is too much for the rivers and streams to handle, thus water will overflow and causes inland floods. Top soil could no longer absorb water due to forest denudation brought about by mining, logging, forest fire, kaingin (slash and burn), dam construction, and other man-made and natural causes like throwing non-biodegradable wastes anywhere that clogged the drainage system.

Over the last decades, we experienced floods caused by storms that devastated some cities throughout the archipelago. As a result, thousands were killed by drowning, thousands of families were rendered homeless and hundreds were missing as torrents of floodwaters swept away everything that lay on its path.

Still fresh in our collective memory are the Ormoc tragedy, the landslide in Guinsaogon, and more recently the floods in Marikina brought about by typhoon Ondoy and the latest flashfloods in Cagayan de Oro (city of golden friendship) and Iligan cities in Mindanao spawned by typhoon Sendong.

Ormoc is a beautiful city. Often dubbed as Leyte's pride, the city was once awarded the environmental title as "the cleanest and greenest city in the Philippines." Tourists can stroll on its plaza by the sea, feel the breeze and watch the fantastic sunset in the afternoon while drinking beer on its seaside stalls.

There's no more trace of a tragedy that happened many years ago except the memories of the dead. Over three thousand lives were lost in the worst flood that ever hit the place. The onrushing waters from the mountains swept away houses built along the river banks and debris were scattered into the sea, along with the bloated corpses of the victims. For weeks or months nobody ate fish in Ormoc thinking that some fish must have nibbled decomposing human flesh.

Still in Leyte a few years after, another calamity struck in the little village of Guinsaogon. The whole village was almost covered by mudslide including most of its inhabitants who were buried alive. Although Guinsaogon was the hardest hit, the landslide was so massive that some portions of the Maharlika Highway were rendered impassable. We were one of those who were stranded on our way to Mindanao from Manila.

We passed  by a stretch of the highway where bulldozers from the Engineering Battalion of the Philippine Army were pushing the mud on the side of the road to let the vehicles pass. As we walked a few kilometers of mud, I noticed a coconut tree still standing on the side of the road.

The tree was originally planted at the top of the cliff and brought down by the landslide. Before we reached the port of Liloan, there were smaller landslides but they did not block the highway. Hundreds of vehicles were lined up on the side of the highway waiting for their turn to be ferried to Lipata port in Surigao City.

These twin tragedies in Leyte that claimed thousands of lives were attributed to the rampant logging and unabated large-scale mining in the area. Logging and mining are lethal combination to ravage the environment.

The presence of the biggest geothermal power plant in Leyte also contributed to the forest denudation. Passing by Kananga near Ormoc, all you can see are balding mountains and clusters of steam emission from the power plant's gigantic pipes that traversed throughout the mountain range.

Flood is considered a natural calamity beyond the control of man. The magnitude of the calamity, however, can be attributed to unabashed ravaging of nature. By felling down the trees in the forests and digging the soils for minerals, we are unwittingly digging our own graves too. Nature has its own peculiar way of hitting back by giving us calamities like floods.

Rene F. Antiga

Banilad, Mandaue City