Philippines: The Bewildering, Lethal Floods

by the Resource Recovery Movement, Center for Human and Society

In the recent period, floods plagued a considerable area, encompassing broad sections across the globe.

Heavy recent flooding in India and Serbia, China, Japan among many other areas around the world

 

In the Philippines, not the Secretary of the Department of National Defense now a bit too advanced in years unlike many past defense secretaries who braved calamities and got wet and dirty on the ground, but the helmsman of the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (NDRRMC) is a mite too busy nowadays. The chief is extremely tied up in many corners that at most times the poor disaster response executive does not even know where to plant his foot next.

Yet it is an inescapable Catch-22 situation. If the new chief of the Philippine Office of Civil Defense and the Secretariat of the NDRRMC follows the examples of his bosses, just stay put and let things unveil all by themselves, the people will be angry.

If the NDRRMC head appears very mobile and busy, the people are still not going to be appeased. They will be just as angry anyway. No option is a better one, even that of balancing between not doing anything and making an effort to be hyperactive.

A senseless new tragedy most recently hit the Philippines – not so much a tragedy as thousands of helpless citizens getting killed.

The powerful storm caused a maritime vessel Maharlika II in Cebu to drown, leaving as many as more than one hundred casualties. As of this writing, 70 persons are missing due to the tragedy.

All over the nation: Floods and landslides, destroyed crops, dead farm animals ruined houses, buildings, vital installations and much more other forms of damage

Both children and adults brave the waters in floods. No one puts the fear in their hearts that doing so is extremely dangerous to their health and the effects may only be felt after a long time.

A really sensible government will take every means to prevent people from getting caught in floods. Sadly enough, this is never true in the Philippines and not in many places around the world. They will simply snort: Expensive solutions! No one specially me needs them! So they let whole communities drown or suffer getting submerged waist or neck-deep in murky, life-threatening floodwaters

Nevertheless, billions worth of agriculture and aquaculture crops, installations, homes, school and other low-rise buildings, among many other infrastructures were destroyed by tropical storm Mario. Metro Manila was paralyzed once more, although not as severely as during Ondoy.

Not only during exemplary, isolated cases, but definitely and specifically because of the recent calamity called Mario, and in the near future, several more typhoons, people are sick or will be taken ill by longer-gestating diseases and the ground including everything in it is gradually being poisoned.

A tremendous number of people were submerged under the floods, once again that God knows how much harmful these unclean and contaminated flood waters have made hundreds of thousands to millions disease-prone. The water resource systems interacting with these floods are also polluted and infected with harmful, health-threatening elements.

The stampede part is the most lethal particularly when it occurs at the time when people are asleep and have no defense nor countermeasure to rely upon as their physical safety all of a sudden totally goes south.The question is: What is the sense of getting over busy over distributing relief clothes, evacuating thousands of citizens and heavily disrupting lives, distributing difficult-to-swallow disaster ready-made food, providing skin-deep medical assistance when people will be dying anyway, people will be getting sick, people will lose all their belongings, farms, fish ponds while all the decisions being made in the first instance are clearly very wrong?

Before the disaster responder has acted, someone preceding him has made the situation superlatively dreadful that when disaster strikes, it is expected that masses of people will become vulnerable and not in a slight or tangential way.

Most of these individuals or groups (associations, enterprises or corporations) are not bothered by conscience since they believe they are not doing anything criminal or immoral at all. So they continue to live pleasured existences without a care for the victims of future disasters whose deadly impact they had caused to be magnified by a significant number of multiplier variables.

And so they are the very reason why the chief of the NDRRMC and the disaster response workers, the social work and local elements delivering relief, the emergency and health services personnel, peace and order officers, the military undertaking humanitarian assistance, among too many others, will be very, very hard at work.

And all for a very senseless reason that unscrupulous, morally corrupt and insane individuals and institutions caused massive fatalities, casualties and damage when there ought to have been minimal injury and impairment of the ecology had better and caring practices been done instead of the unconscionable, wantonly destructive ways of selected unworthy, cruel, ruthless members of society.

Those whose lives and belongings will be touched by the disaster will certainly suffer in themost horrible circumstances.  If help doesn’t come, they either die or fade away into oblivion or experience their agony over a long painful terminal period.  The misery does not end even when they survive. In some cases, their pain and torment or physical afflictions – the experience of loss or damage to their valuables – become even more severe.

Needless to say, in the case of Haiyan (Yolanda), the relief was too late in coming that simply because the public sector sat on the problem and got bogged down by its own undoing: not improving logistics for delivering aid to victims of calamities.

Before the disaster responder has acted, someone preceding him has made the situation superlatively dreadful that when disaster strikes, it is expected that masses of people will become vulnerable and not in a slight or tangential way. . . .

Most of these individuals or groups (associations, enterprises or corporations) are not bothered by conscience since they sincerely believe they are not doing anything criminal or immoral at all. So they continue to live pleasured existences without a care for the victims of future disasters whose deadly impact they had caused to be magnified by a significant number of multiplier variables.

Substantial numbers of landslides came about as a result of heavy rains and uncontrollable flooding.

Significant quantity of crops were destroyed

Still however, Undersecretary Pama is at the place where solutions for a multifaceted, convoluted problem such as the dangerous exposure of people to floods at the risk of being taken seriously sick or even dead. A little less could be said about home appliances and vehicles; their rate of survival is slightly lower than for their owners and guardians.

Obviously, every flood victim will not hesitate to say the government has done it again. And are the people familiar, contented with or immune to waist and neck-deep flood in Metro Manila, Central Luzon, Ilocos Region and many other areas? In some cases, flood waters reached overhead height.

It is common knowledge that treading, wading in dirty flood waters is inimical to the health of both humans and animals. Information and education campaigns abound about not dipping or submerging the body or any part since it is a serious health hazard.

Extent of floodwaters made parts of Metro Manila look like islands in the midst of the sea and boats just needed to be on the scene as if they were part of the woodwork

Yet aside from surface runoff water, most particularly in Luzon government decided as it has always done on its own with careless abandon, to release excess water from dams.

This action clearly endangers communities without alternate canals and floodway systems. Even when the public sector deems it sensible and proper to commit the act, the consequences should have been done with prudence and with a number of fallback positions considering the high level of danger it poses to the citizenry.

As a matter of fact, if the public sector is truly adequately sensible, since this act of releasing hundreds of thousands of tons of excess water from dams is perilous, during the non-rainy periods, pro-active measures ought to be done. Even if many or most of these measures are really all too expensive.

The Philippine Government under Mr. Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III has proven that it can arrogate discretion onto itself, over more than one hundred billion pesos for gifts to legislators, executives and insignificant projects. No reason that several billions can be dedicated to combating floods coming from the deliberate releasing of excess water from dams into communities.

Certainly, to undertake solutions such as creating river bypass is expensive. The entire cumulative weight of past administrations never took it to themselves to accomplish this. Yet they may have all but justified their inaction by the mere fact that only during this Aquino regime are storm surges, flash floods and deluges caused by released water from dams more deadly and more pronounced.

Whether or not dozens, hundreds, thousands died or not in the recent Typhoons Glenda and Mario, the mere fact that Metro Manila as in the occurrence of Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) and Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), suffered hundreds of thousands, millions of people with pestering floods is an indictment on society for not being able to deal with flood control.

From the 1970s up until recently, storm surge was an unheard of concept. While Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) was fatal along with Frank and other similar calamities during the immediate past regime, the new kind of storms and super typhoons visiting the Philippines in recent time are much more powerful.

The extent of hazards therefore accompanying public sector decisions to wantonly release flood-causing waters from dams are presently multiplied.

No past president and their minions have ever taken it into their resolve to solve this malingering problem of placing people at risk every time heavy rains occur and high critical levels in dams are breached, forcing the gatekeepers to release tons of floodwaters into communities full of helpless citizens.

Then rescue, relief and recovery of both living bodies and dead corpses is undertaken. Huge amounts of funds are earmarked for such post-disaster actions with little or no money to pay for less than four hundred NDRRMC casuals about to be retrenched. No early countermeasures or pro-active long-term solutions are applied.

As far as a substantially decent space of time to allow the victims of floods to prepare and evacuate is concerned, there can never be any. Since forecasting not only in the Philippines is a sham. In many areas around the world today, forecasting is useless, particularly when it concerns floods or related forms of geo-ecological hazards.

The recent tropical storm Mario provides insights into how the country’s scientific community and leading disaster risk reduction agencies can prevent the fiascoes of Ketsana (Ondoy), Haiyan (Yolanda) and Typhoon Fong-wong (Bagyong Mario).

If there is still rationality abounding amidst the mad rush to grab skim money or collect separation compensation due to the fast-diminishing period of the stay in power of the Aquino regime, some appropriate solutions need to be applied to the lessening of the impact of heavy rains such as heavy flooding upon communities or eliminating the risk of spreading toxicity from the overflowing flood waters.

All these insights can be applied and appropriate services can be delivered that will benefit the population of communities that clearly are unnecessarily being pestered by floods that should not be in their homes in the first place.

As it had constantly been espoused, there is a need to provide the public with a more decent lead time to safeguard their homes and valuables, and most especially their own life.

The current alert system of the government does not take into account the deadly and fatal impact of extreme flooding that takes lives and property in its wake.

The people in communities are being blamed for dumping garbage everywhere with complete abandon. However, the public is paying heavily for taxes going to garbage collection, solid waste management, with much of these funds being pocketed by local officials.

If taken cumulatively, the skim from the funds purported to be paid to favored garbage collection business organizations, among many other public sector dealings concerned with important aspects of public sector services and activity that unequivocably contribute to the hazards brought about by floods is literally a real mountain of cash.

Too many billions of cash both supposedly lie dormant and on the other hand, continue to get collected from the unsuspecting public for sewerage management. For the past more one decade since waterworks and sewerage services have been privatized, the private water utility companies in Metro Manila for instance take and keep the money for sewage management. Where is all these money going to? What are they doing with it?

A past Director – a top level executive of the Asian Development Bank, lamented both the Maynilad and Manila Water, inherited from the old Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage Systems (MWSS) – popularly still known as NAWASA and added on some minor components to – sewage treatment facilities for Metro Manila. Most of Metro Manila, most of the towns and cities in the outlying regions, have not moved forward from the practice of employing septic tanks as septage collection system. (See related articles: In Defense of Septic Tanks.)

However, sludge-carrier transport suction off the unleached waste and transport these septage from various points in Metro Manila to the Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) facilities at the Food Terminal Inc. (FTI) in Taguig City but even these collection points overflow when there are floods. Simple extended rainfall permeating through the STP tanks will already force these facilities to spill out their contents and pollute Taguig and other areas.

It is such a mystifying circumstance that the Food Terminal Inc. in Taguig City is also a collection and storage point for freshly harvested and preserved imported food items.

When the inadequately sized Sewage Treatment Plants inexorably overflow, why the decision to keep them in a place where they will ultimately come in contact with and contaminate food stuffs intended for millions of the consuming public – both the locals and foreigners? Sen. Peter Cayetano of Taguig City who is running after the head of the Vice President cannot sufficiently elucidate about this because he too, like many disaster responders, is exceedingly busy and most possibly will refuse to help you and me. Even if you simply want to know whether the food storage areas were reached by the floods, he probably might not tell either you or me too. Whoever can satisfactorily provide an explanation for this quandary would really be someone equipped with an exceptionally superior intellect bordering on genius.

Taguig City Food Terminal Inc. facilities house food that you will buy, cook and eat in your dining table, in food storage facilities. The water utilities like Maynilad and Manila Water that hold more than 10 billion pesos of collections for sewage-septage (human waste – manure, urine, etc.) treatment fees inherited treatment plants that are also situated in the same food terminal area. The sewage-septage plants do not have enough capacity to hold water. When rains come, their contents spill over. Pray that they do not reach the food storage areas.

The deliberate contamination of the water resource system is not being stopped because no one believes that a poisonous or health threatening lake, river, canal, is not dangerous even if it kills people, fish, other forms of life that it will come into contact with particularly during flood. Simply because the death was caused by a disaster. And everyone is bound to swallow the sad justification that during disaster anything – especially bad things – do happen so that no one or nothing else is to blame.

New scientific knowledge, novel technologies abound and proper processes, procedures, methods – by design are in place – but these are not being constructively made use of and will not be employed for a long time unless an institution like the NDRRMC or another more powerful cluster will take positive action.

It is not enough to be mouthing justifications about the people throwing garbage all around thoughtlessly, without considering the effect on the environment.

A useless effort to keep blaming everyone else but the key people who ought to have done something to make the situation right.

Whether or not dozens, hundreds, thousands died or not in the recent Typhoons Glenda and Mario, the mere fact that Metro Manila as in the occurrence of Typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) and Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda), suffered hundreds of thousands, millions of people with pestering floods is an indictment on society.

The sin is not being able to deal with flood control; taking measures to secure the citizenry from possible disease or death brought about by the harmful wastes and toxins present in dirty flood water; not being able to provide safe spaces for people that get trapped in the floods and most of all, the inability to safeguard the people from both the effect of the calamity or acts that criminals do when people are herded to evacuation centers leaving their abodes wide open to invasions.

A horrendous amount of money is available to control, minimize or eradicate flooding not only in Metro Manila but also in other parts of the country.

Along with these resources are also funds for making the ecology safe from hazardous and toxic elements that could permeate into surface and ground water.

These funds are hardly accounted for by those that ideally should be protecting or keeping the people away from toxins, poisons, health hazards that are present in flood waters. However, such kind of civil servants hardly exist in the present setting.

Even if the positions of such kind of public servants will be created, there is no guarantee that anyone would want to fill the slot since the conventional wisdom is not exactly to stop flooding from killing people and damaging property, agriculture and aquaculture ecosystems.

It appears that everyone’s conviction is just to allow water to find its own level, do nothing about it, and let it commit mass slaughter, wreak havoc on private and public property, wherever it will find itself in. Those that cold-bloodedly release water from dams, simply think “Bato bato sa Langit, ang tamaan, huwag magalit.” (Rock coming from the Heavens, make them not angry whosoever is hit.)

It is such a mystifying circumstance that the Food Terminal Inc. in Taguig City is also a collection and storage point for freshly harvested and preserved imported food items. When the inadequately sized Sewage Treatment Plants inexorably overflow, why the decision to keep them in a place where they will ultimately come in contact with and contaminate food stuffs intended for millions of the consuming public – both the locals and foreigners?

Funds that should have helped stop heavy flooding and prevent toxins in surface and ground water

• Sewerage Management Collections by Private Water Utilities – local and foreign (1970s to present)
  
• Dam Construction and Management Operation – local and foreign (1970s to present)
  
• Regulatory funds to control use of toxic, hazardous materials by construction activities and organizations – local and foreign (1980s to present)
  
• Wetlands Management – local and foreign (1990s to present)
  
• Flood Control Program – local and foreign (1970s to present)
  
• Privileged garbage collection businesses – local (1970s to present)
  
• Local Government Units funding for managing garbage disposal (1970s to present)
  
• Foreign-Assisted Programs for Solid Waste Management – (1980s to present)
  
• Funding for the Environmental Management Bureau of the environment and natural resources department (1970s to the present)
  
• Other fund sources – local and foreign
  

Perspectives on Safeguarding Water Resources from Deadly Toxic Elements, Hazards to Human Health and the Ecology

The causal effect of obnoxious current practices upon all our water resources is extremely damaging but the pull is towards not doing something about the existing system.

The deliberate contamination of the water resource system is not being stopped because no one believes that a poisonous or health threatening lake, river, canal, is not dangerous even if it kills people, fish, other forms of life that it will come into contact with particularly during flood. Simply because the death was caused by a disaster. And everyone is bound to swallow the sad justification that during disaster anything – especially bad things – do happen so that no one or nothing else is to blame.

New scientific knowledge, novel technologies abound and proper processes, procedures, methods – by design are in place – but these are not being constructively made use of and will not be employed for a long time unless an institution like the NDRRMC or another more powerful cluster will take positive action.

For the past few decades, new means for collecting septage or liquid waste from households and industries before they are leached has been present. Still, however the very ancient method of using septic tanks appears to be the practice that will be in place for another hundred years – even if this system is extremely unsafe.

Reckless Wholesale Dumping of Agro-Industrial Waste

According to the former President of the Association of Employees of National Defense (ASEND), during the regime of the late Ferdinand Marcos, the Department of National Defense (DND) with accompanying officials of the environment management and regulatory office, led in the relentless apprehension and arrest of owners of industrial establishments along the Pasig River that unlawfully and without sensitivity to those that will be affected, release their toxic effluents into the River Pasig.

This was the 70s until the 80s. Each time the detained owners would only stay for a few hours and will be released. After some time, they are back in their old practice of toxifying the ecology over and over again that leads to their repeated arrests. Their modus operandi is dumping their waste surreptitiously during or after midnight when everyone else is resting.

Most of those that are arrested are Chinese. When interrogated over why they keep on repeating the same violations and why, those Chinese business owners say: “It is okay to be arrested; I will just pay the fine after all its just very small money.” Up to this date, the same practice has been going on at the Pasig River and in many other rivers in the country.

In a certain part of the Marikina River system, the waters are full of the detergents as well as manure and urine from the pigs of the animal fattening business called Foremost Farms as well as too many other agro and industrial establishments in the area.

Nearer to the Foremost Farms, if one’s bare or protected feet are exposed to river water, either the skin or the shoe and socks protecting the foot will immediately get damaged by the potent chemicals and the feces of pigs poses dangers to health.

As early as the 1980s, enforcers conceived of the solution of penalizing violators of environmental regulations with stiffer sanctions and greater fines. Up to this date, it is unheard of to fine the polluters of poison into the environment with multimillion fines. Instead multimillions go to the dirty hands of environment managers, subnational and local government officials that may reprimand or remind the outlaw businessmen that they need to heavily grease a few to be allowed to continue their criminal excesses.

Fixation Upon Obsolete Septic Tank Practice

In the old times some hundred years ago, it was novel and possibly just and respectable to call the septic tank as a technology. This is no longer true today. Sadly however, up to this date, many business organizations continue to believe in the conventional wisdom that the septic tank system is still the only correct way of dealing with household and industrial septage.

Septic tanks have acquired fantastically new and modern, even aesthetic features. Even in the old times, those that used the septic tank thought it very high class to use expensive material like marble, granite, even expensive metals for their septic tanks. Today the ordinary concrete or brick septic tanks are being replaced by highly modernized fiber glass, hard plastic, or such other material as long as these will be non-porous – which is the dream of septic tank installers and promoters of the septic tank system.

Even the Sewage Treatment Plants (STP) themselves, have very low holding capacity that each time heavy rainfall occurs, are also filled up to overflowing levels and all the excess effluents go inevitably into the riverine, canal, stream, creek receptacles, spilling over into Metro Manila or other towns’ and cities’ streets and smack into the doorsteps and inside the household of ordinary citizens.

Floods, fires and other catastrophes natural or human-made guarantee equal opportunities or tragedies for both the rich and poor, depending upon how secured the prospective victim is. Disasters are failures when it comes to choice: Kings, Queens, Presidents and Ministers just like everyone else in the masses are not immune to the dangers of being swept away by storm surge, powerful tornadoes, killer earthquakes and other hazards.

Overflowing Septage Tanks

There is guarantee that the dirt and contaminable ingredients inside septic tanks will not spill out during floods, particularly in the Philippines where the septage collection technology is too ancient and unreliable.

In an old Quezon City, Metro Manila condominium to cite one example, where sixteen residential units built in the 1980s share just one septic tank on one side of the building, another sixteen share another single septic tank on the other side, no septage maintenance is being done by the condominium owner.  As a result, flood or no flood, when the septage overflows, it goes into the bath of the ground floor residents of the condominium.

On the other hand, when the waterworks utilities decided to remove several decades-old rusty and dilapidated potable water pipes that were regularly contaminated by the escaping effluents from the septic tanks, they replaced the same rusted pipes with synthetic PVC pipes. Due to excess pressure, the PVC pipes break and thus the contamination is on again. The people in those condominium buildings have been using potable water infused with blessings from the septic tanks.

Resolving the problem of toxicity and other hazards from floods

Clearly some positive, pro-active measures need to be done – with all the lessons learned from past disasters not only in the Philippines such as those from Ondoy, Yolanda, Glenda, Mario, but from other countries as in the case of the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti, Hurricane Katrina in the United States and many others.

If there will be no constructive actions taken, with the government forecast of five to eight more strong tropical storms or typhoons coming to the Philippines before the end of December 2014, the problems about floods and their attendant predicaments could create mountains of setbacks for the country.

Every manager knows that prevention is so much better than damage control: here is therefore where the NDRRMC can play the hero. With nearly all of the government departments represented in the Council, all the needed requirements for undertaking pro-active solutions are present.

It will not take too much planning to start one or two doable projects to creating river bypass or providing ways for water not to accumulate much more abundantly in Metro Manila, Calabarzon or Central Luzon’s heavily populated areas.

Most of all, as much as can be done to the best human capability as possible, to deflect the flow of the flood wherever septic tanks are concentrated, for single household or industrial user or the larger ones for multiple users (some septic tanks such as in Aurora Province hold the refuse of not only an entire barangay but a large portion of the capital Baler, Aurora and this large, multiple user septic tank – for the love of God Almighty – is located next to the main Baler river).

This holds true also for the places where the Sewage Treatment Plants are located. Flood waters must be redirected so as not to allow these STPs to overflow. What is the use of leaching plants when their sludge and dirty waste water are deposited into the mainstream community to contaminate the water supply or afflict people and animals with illnesses, toxify plants?

Too many post-disaster Johnny-come-late, Johnny-do-good acts will become unnecessary if and when less people are exposed to flood. Further, the funds for relief and the donated goods to feed evacuees or in place victims are fewer – therefore giving lesser opportunities for vultures stealing these resources for their pockets and minimal chances the vultures will offer the goods for sale to commercial distributors like the malls in Divisoria, Manila that up to this time very unabashedly and instead with great pride display the donated relief items intended for Yolanda.

The problems that go with flooding are not extremely complex however it should not and never be assessed simplistically with the aspect of throwing away small to large amounts of garbage indiscriminately and inconsiderately.

A lot needs to be done and much of their accomplishment will depend upon super bodies like the NDRRMC or a more powerful cluster.

But the time for waiting is way past over a very long time ago, so some catching up action has to be done now and not any day later.

Let the people be safe from dirty and toxic elements in runoff water and minimize flood borne illness, death as well as contaminations of whatever the spill over waters touch. The next time you dip yourself in a flood, remember that you might not be safe. The next time you open your mouth to take in food, unless your grocer directly buys your food from France, Spain or any other source without going through storage, find out whether floodwaters reached Taguig City’s Food Terminal Inc.