Punchline
Monthly fluvial parades in Dagupan?
By Ermin Garcia Jr.
The recent too frequent tidal flooding in Dagupan City is surely creating a wave of serious concern among residents. Could the city really be sinking? Will parts of the city soon be swallowed or just washed away? They wonder.
The city hall was quick to point to climate change as the culprit and evidently wishes it to be exculpated by the global phenomenon should the situation worsen. Its suggestion to raise street levels to offset the aggravation on the community is logical but shortsighted. If you raise the street levels, you keep roads unimpeded but with the streets functioning like a dam, the flood waters will inevitably settle on the sides, meaning the houses, buildings, etc. will bear the brunt of the trapped waters.
Mayor Al Fernandez, obviously feeling helpless about it, tried to paint a silver lining by citing the opportunities that could be created by a community under water. Duh? A banca-building industry for the city? Paddling ambulant vendors? Houses on stilts? Monthly fluvial parades?
Then, city residents are told by DPWH engineers that they must learn to live with it. Duh? The residents deserve a better response.
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The city can ill afford armchair generals and experts to prescribe knee-jerk solutions. Solutions should be arrived at given the full participation not only of the local government but the community and environmental engineers to keep the city literally above water.
The worst that can happen is if the city government lulls itself into complacency by simply believing that it fully understands the cause and effect of Al Gore’s ‘climate change’ principle. Until a viable or doable solution for the long term is defined, the city government must know that it remains accountable for the damage to life and property caused by tidal flooding.
What is certain today is that no amount of debate on its cause will help mitigate the situation for the residents. Nothing will stop it now. What the city needs is a studied long-term approach to stave off a calamity waiting to happen.
Unlike the super typhoons and killer quakes that hit the city without warning, the city’s communities are understandably vulnerable to deadly situations; but, in the case of the worsening tidal flooding, future generations will never understand why they have to suffer interminably all because our generation would rather debate the cause than act on the solution.
If the Fernandez administration wishes to go down in history as the administration that saved the city, it must act today, not tomorrow. It can start by organizing a series of forums and seminars involving stakeholders in the city, i.e., barangay kapitans, business sector, home associations, civic clubs, the academe, NGOs, etc. to be facilitated by foreign and local environment experts and engineers who have fully studied the city’s topography and rivers.
The ideal output of such an activity should include identification of endangered barangays (or barangays at serious risk) , the fiscal measures to be adopted by the city government and the communal work to be done by residents, and establishment or designation of city hall unit mandated to monitor levels of tidal flooding in designated areas each time.
Am I being an alarmist? Perhaps so if nobody believes we have a self-inflicted calamity waiting to happen. Simply imagine the city at the height of tidal flooding and a 3-day killer storm or 6-7 intensity earthquake, or God forbid, a tidal wave hits the city. Imagine the damages to lives and properties all because we are in constant state of denial today.
The people of Malabon in Metro Manila are suffering immensely today because their officials failed to respond in time. To this day, the unfinished flood control facility in that town is but a monument to government’s neglect and corruption.
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THE COPS ARE THE “HIGHEST”. The police are definitely on a roll. In the words of TV talk show host Boy Abunda, the police are “the highest”, whatever that means.
Two weeks ago, the leader and some members of the notorious Colisao Gang, a gun-for-hire syndicate, were nabbed. Then last week, members of a kidnap-for-ransom syndicate were killed in a shootout!
It is reports of police encounters like these that beat glowing quarterly statistical reports on crime indices. The cold numbers mean nothing when victims continue to fall by the wayside senselessly.
Perhaps the string of successful police operations has something to do with the appointment of P/Chief Supt. Romeo Gatan as regional director. Or that our police officials are finally being made to account for their efforts in preventing and preempting commission of crime, not simply in solving committed crimes.
The two successful police operations were about crime prevention campaigns, protecting the citizenry from becoming statistics in police reports. That’s big ‘A’ for their efforts.
But whatever is the motivation, the community is certainly grateful to these men in uniform. More… more… more!
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