A disaster-prone country like the Philippines should by now be a nation of experts on calamities and how to deal with them. But, as Ondoy has shown, Filipinos are almost always caught unawares. And often, the high cost of these calamities are caused not so much by lack of knowledge or resources as by poor governance.
MANILA - In a Third World country like the Philippines, it is probably not surprising that the poor are always the first to suffer the worst of any disaster. The havoc that Ondoy (Ketsana) wrought the past week not only added to their suffering - it underscored the reality that interventions to mitigate the impact of calamities hardly work, if at all, for the poor.
"Poor people in much of the world are constantly threatened by the variability of the weather that they experience from year to year," said a report last year by the United Nations Development Program.
"Poor people have become very good at adapting to the vicissitudes of their weather," it said. Unfortunately, the report added, they "are already close to the limits of their capacities to cope, and the added effects of climate change may push them beyond their coping capacities unless real efforts are made to prepare for changes in climate."
A disaster-prone country like the Philippines - it is battered by storms and typhoons at least 20 times a year; volcanic eruptions, landslides and earthquakes are fairly common - should by now be a nation of experts on calamities and how to deal with them. But, as Ondoy has shown, Filipinos are almost always caught unawares. And often, the high cost of these calamities are caused not so much by lack of knowledge or resources as by poor governance.
"We were all caught by surprise," Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine National Red Cross, told Bulatlat in an interview.
Pang's assessment may baffle many. After all, Pagasa, the country's weather bureau, had issued warnings on Ondoy as early as Thursday last week, even raising alert levels the next day. The warnings had been unheeded. It is understandable for the poor not to immediately vacate their homes. The same cannot be said of the government's apparent failure to anticipate the magnitude of the calamity.
As a result, while Ondoy did affect severely the middle class and the rich, the poor suffered much more greatly. Even cities that prided themselves with orderliness and disaster preparedness proved unable to cope with the ravages of Ondoy.
To be sure, the volume of rain Ondoy poured on Metro Manila and several nearby provinces was unusually large - a month's worth of rain in just 12 hours, the most since 1967 - and experts said Metro Manila would have been inundated anyway even if it had the best sewerage and drainage system in the world.
"There are not enough infrastructures to cope with the problem of high volume of precipitation," said Arjun Thapan, the director-general of the Southeast Asia department of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which has been financing programs in the region to improve sewerage and drainage systems. But, he added in an interview, "no matter how sufficient the system is, it was probably not enough to handle" the flooding of Metro Manila.
"Even if the infrastructures were in place, it would still be overwhelming," said Anthony Golez, the vice-chairman of the National Disaster Coordinating Council. He defended the government by saying that it had always been prepared for calamities. But, he added, "Let me put it this way: We were preparing for an Intensity 7 earthquake but Intensity 8 came."
Critics may chafe at Golez's statement but what is not in dispute is that Ondoy's toll could have been much lesser had government agencies and local governments done enough preparations and had they not been merely reactive, as one expert put it. Metro Manila, after all, is a disaster waiting to happen.
Choked by Garbage
Metro Manila is groaning with overpopulation - more than 12 million people. Its waterways - most of it are old, narrow and ill-maintained - are choked.
According to the ADB's "Garbage Book," a book on solid-waste management in Manila published in 2004, Metro Manila generates more than 6,700 tons of solid garbage every day. Only a small fraction of it - 720 tons - is recycled or composted. Nearly 4,500 tons are hauled into dumpsites that local governments maintain. But the rest - about 1,500 tons - end up in lakes, rivers, creeks, even in the Manila Bay, or burned openly.
Such a high volume of solid waste has proved challenging to local governments units, with some LGUs fighting over the dumping (the "not in my backyard" argument) and often with the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the superbody tasked to manage the capital's garbage and traffic systems.
Equally challenging is instilling discipline among residents on how to be responsible with their garbage. The MMDA and some local governments, for instance, have launched campaigns on this but still, Metro Manila remains littered with trash, from the big ones that are dumped in street corners to the candy wrappers carelessly thrown by commuters in streets.
The capital's garbage, needless to say, clogs its drainage system, so that a slight downpour often floods many communities - from the low-lying slums of Tondo to the poor communities of Pasig. Worse, Metro Manila has a combined septic and storm-water system so that every time it flood human waste is expelled onto the streets along with floodwater.
Blocked Waterways
Complicating this are the waterways blocked by slum dwellers. Among these are the Perdito family, who, along with 20 other families, had shanties built on the underside of the Cambridge bridge in West Kamias in Quezon City, over an estero or creek. Ondoy completely washed away those shanties so that today, Evangeline Perdito, the 37-year-old mother of six, is scavenging for scraps of wood to rebuild her home under the bridge.
Metro Manila used to have nearly 30 esteros but these are either blocked by garbage and slum dwellers or have been appropriated by commercial developments such as malls and other big structures.
The Manggahan Floodway, which was built in the '80s to ease the pressure of floodwater in Metro Manila, is also choked by informal settlers, fish ponds, even growths of kangkong (water spinach), the source of livelihood for many of these poor slum dwellers.
Most of the pumping stations around the metropolis that are supposed to decrease floodwater by pumping excess water into the Manila Bay are working but because the esteros and other waterways are clogged, not much water can reach these stations, so they don't do much help.
According to the MMDA, there are more than 70,000 families in Metro Manila like the Perditos, mostly Filipinos who are forced to seek their fortunes in the capital because of the lack or absence of livelihood or jobs in the provinces. Authorities have been trying to demolish these shanties but have not been offering any viable alternatives to the families, so they return or move to another area in the capital.
Faulty Urban Planning
Exacerbating the problem is the failure by the government to implement effective plans for urban, land use as well as emergency or disaster management. It has also failed to impose the law, according to experts. This, they said, can be attributed to corruption or sheer incompetence.
While local governments may hesitate to prevent the poor from building shanties along the banks of creeks and rivers, there is a law that prohibits that, according to Meliton B. Juanico, an urban and environmental planner who chairs the Department of Geology at the University of the Philippines (UP). Juanico acknowledges the reasons these poor families have in living along these waterways but, he said, "an effective leader should have the political will to implement the law and the imagination to deal with the needs of those affected."
Moreover, lax implementation of zoning laws has allowed commercial establishments to put up structures on esteros.
Another law - Presidential Decree 705, or the Revised Forestry Code - prohibits the building of houses and residential development on slopes of more than 10 degrees. But developers are able to get away with it and the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) has been approving development plans that violate this law, Juanico said.
"The demand for subdivisions with scenic vistas is high," Juanico pointed out, "and as a result many developers look to areas like Rodriguez or San Mateo" - both in Rizal province, the hardest hit by Ondoy. He explained that developing areas for housing on slopes of more than 10 degrees results in serious erosion of the soil.
And to think, Juanico added, that the Sierra Madre, at the foot of which the towns of Rodriguez and San Mateo are located, is now denuded and not able to catch most of the rainwater that eventually flows down to Metro Manila.
Thapan, of the ADB, agrees that as far as zoning and development controls go, "there has been a weakness in that respect, in so far as city management is concerned and requires strengthening."
Lack of Foresight
Fouad Bendimerad, an engineer who chairs the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative, a nonprofit group that advises governments around the world on disaster management, rues the fact that the Philippines is so battered by disasters that it hardly has time to create, let alone implement, master plans. "What is happening is that we are constantly reacting to the disaster that is happening," he said in a phone interview from Bangkok. The government, he said, "is always in reaction mode and that takes all the resources."
Bendimerad also recalled how a comprehensive earthquake disaster plan that he and his team developed between 2005 and 2007, with funding from the Japan International Cooperation Agency and other agencies, remained unimplemented for lack of funds.
Juanico, of the UP's geography department, agrees. "We are good at making plans but are bad at implementing them," he said in an interview.
Many find such a failure to implement a disaster-management plan a disaster in itself, considering that, as per the allegation of Bukidnon Rep. Teofisto Guingona III, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had used a large portion of her emergency and calamity funds for her travels abroad, where she and her entourage spent millions on expensive dinners.
"Mrs. Arroyo, who designated herself 'climate change czar,' should be held accountable for lacking in genuine policies and programs for mitigating climate change impacts and for mismanaging funds for emergencies and disasters," said Clemente Bautista of the environment group Kalikasan-PNE. Arroyo, he added, should also be held liable "for promoting and pursuing environmentally destructive practices such as mining, logging, and land-use conversion. All of these hasten and aggravate the effects of climate change."
Another group, the Philippine Climate Watch Alliance (PCWA), assailed Arroyo for failing to implement honest-to-goodness measures to deal with the effects of climate change.
"Scientists, experts and even the basic sectors have warned that the Philippines will experience extreme weather events, floods, landslides and worsening poverty because of climate change," said Meggie Nolasco, PCWA's spokesperson. "This should have prompted the Arroyo government to map out plans and policies to lessen and help its people adapt to these problems." However, she said, "these warnings were left unheeded by the government."
Juanico, of the University of the Philippines, said the Philippines needs an effective and compassionate political leadership. "With that type of leader, even if we have limited resources, we can make do and deal with calamities more effectively," he said. A weak national leadership, he said, does not invite cooperation and does not encourage discipline among the public.
And in a calamity-prone and poor country like the Philippines, "an ineffective leader," Juanico said, "is a disaster in itself." (With a report from Alexander Martin Remollino / bulatlat.com)