ANGELES CITY – Engineering interventions such as more flood control projects will not provide lasting, much less permanent, solutions to the massive inundation of Metro Manila as witnessed last week with the monsoon rains.
“The more we construct, the more we replace absorbent soil and trees with concrete pavement, the more the occurrence of flash floods,” said the Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement.
The broad-based advocacy group expressed its sympathies with the flood victims and assisted in relief operations in the flooded areas of Pampanga. This, even as it joined calls for a more “holistic approach” in the search for a solution to floodings, especially in Metro Manila.
“Geographically, Manila is already prone to flooding, being below sea level. This is compounded by the massive buildings and constructions that sapped the earth’s capacity to absorb rain water, the cutting of trees, the explosion of the urban population with all the social costs – garbage, shantytowns atop esteros, pollution,” commented PGKM chair Ruperto Cruz.
“Factor in climate change and you have an explosive mix that could only spell disaster,” he added. “As it was in Ondoy in 2009, in Pedring and Quiel last year, and in the habagat rains now.”
Cruz called the decongestion of Metro Manila “an imperative” in any “feasible solution” to Metro Manila floodings.
“So long as the national capital region keeps on taking in more people it cannot anymore afford to contain, more devastating floods will come,” he said.
Cruz said the solution has always been with government, recalling how previous administrations have conceptualized the development of regional growth areas in various parts of the Philippines, “like the so called Central Luzon ‘W’ Growth Corridor.”
Expanding industries and trade in the countrysides will check the mass labor migration to Metro Manila, Cruz furthered.
“More than a strong political will, what is needed is to de-imperialize Manila, to stop its being the be-all and end-all of the Philippines,” Cruz said. “And for the regions to have their fair share of development in the process.”
“An eye-opener,” Cruz said of the comments made by Tourism Secretary Ramon Jimenez on the sidelines of the travel and tourism trade show at the SMX Convention Center last Friday.
Jimenez said the flooding in Metro Manila underscored the importance of the government’s “pocket open skies” policy, which opened up some of the country’s airports to foreign carriers.
“If up to now the only gateway to the Philippines is Metro Manila, the flooding would have posed a bigger problem,” media reports quoted Jimenez as saying.
“This shows the validity of our stand for the full development of the Clark airport as premier international gateway,” Cruz said. “A major step in de-imperializing Manila.”
The PGKM since 1992 has advocated for Clark as premier international airport of the country on account of its 2,500 hectares in aviation area, its twin runways that accommodated the biggest military and commercial aircraft in the world, and its flood-free location.
The full operation of the Clark airport as premier gateway is seen as the engine of socio-economic development of Central and North Luzon.
