Swamped under
For us Sitio Felix’s boys of summer circa 1980s, the Manggahan Floodway Project of then-President Ferdinand Marcos provided the thrills of spending lazy afternoons swimming and diving off its newly dredged banks.
We’d trudged from Cainta to Pasig for kilometers, our weariness immediately replaced by youthful exuberance and joy upon seeing the floodway’s pristine water glinting with the sun’s rays.
Along the way, we’d trade stories, fool around and throw pebbles at the carabaos. School affairs we chatted about were limited to the cute transferees from other schools and the new ones coming in soon.
As a sixth grader, I was yet to enroll in one of those ubiquitous learn-to-swim programs, thus I limited myself to dog paddling while propped by Styrofoam boards.
Friends like Froilan and Dodoy, an older boy from my grandma’s street who kept secret my unauthorized meanderings, would take to the water like they were born with fins and gills.
You’re reading this because Dodoy snatched me from a watery grave decades ago at Manggahan Floodway. Frozen in time, surreal, was seeing Dodoy diving and swimming toward me as I went under the water.
My life did not flash before me; there was neither pain nor struggle. I remember that all I thought about was the old folks’ admonition against swimming in creeks and rivers.
“Ah, the water nymphs would come and get you,” they’d warn. “You’ll live with them, but then you’d be dead, your body never to be found.”
So, “this is it,” was the thought that looped in my mind for the few seconds that seemed like an eternity before Dodoy plucked me from the bottom and dragged me like a dog to safety.
“Water may be life, but flooding poses the exact opposite. Presently, it takes only hours of rains — not days — to swamp us under.
Typhoon “Ondoy” did offer a lot of people to the water nymphs in September 2009. One of the searing images of its deluge was entire houses with people atop their roofs being washed away — barely making it past under the Manggahan Bridge — to who knew where.
I found myself atop that bridge as “Ondoy” submerged Metro Manila. Hours back, I drove like crazy from my mother’s house in Cainta — chased by floodwater rushing from uphill Antipolo and from the dams that opened their gates.
Having parked my car to safety at Robinson’s Galleria, I walked back to Manggahan, the highest point overlooking the then already submerged Pasig, many times trying to cross to Cainta to check on my mother and grandma.
I would succeed doing that, hanging by a boat’s side, but only a day later.
“My life did not flash before me; there was neither pain nor struggle.
Governments have come and gone, and many grand flood-mitigation plans had been rolled out and funded with billions of pesos through the decades. But the flood has remained with us, adding itself to death and taxes among the only certainties in life.
Private sector participation is heavy in the latest efforts to find a solution to the perennial flooding that, because of climate change and rapid residential and commercial developments, can only be expected to get worse.
Good luck to them and us because, with scientists saying global warming is causing seawater levels to rise due to the melting of the polar ice caps, the problem swamping us may never be resolved.
The photos and videos coming out of Central China are downright scary, with entire communities submerged by heavy rains and with subway train passengers dazed or shocked by the rushing water.
Here at home, many are now calling the monsoon rains heightened by a typhoon and a tropical depression as the start of a“siyam-siyam,” or literally nine days and nine nights of rains. Pray that it is not.
When that phrase “siyam-siyam” was used to warn of apocalyptic storms, floods and landslides, it may be argued that the Philippines still had a lot of farmlands to soak up and take in floodwater.
Not anymore. Development that has not included a wholistic flood control system has only resulted to concrete jungles — of cities and communities — that are very vulnerable to national calamities such as what we are seeing now.
Water may be life, but flooding poses the exact opposite. Presently, it takes only hours of rains — not days — to swamp us under.