Flooding in Dagupan
Jeremias Andrade Carrera
2 June 2010
Dear Mr. Ceralde:
This forum discussed this issue at length way back and one of the posters suggested the drainage system in Chicago or Singapore but which are not applicable to the situation. Other posters suggested enclosing Dagupan and I was criticized for berating the engineers for raising the road level of the highway in Tapuac-Lucao.
In the first place the so-called Judge de Venecia Extension should have been an elevated highway in its entirety except the ends. That highway with very few narrow culverts can act like a “DAM” preventing the floodwaters from exiting the built-up area of Dagupan City and the adjoining municipalities.
If you will look at the Dagupan-Calasiao-Santa Barbara drainage area through Google, you will notice that to solve the problem requires involvement of the other municipalities. But before Dagupan can approach these municipalities for cooperation and help, Dagupan must look at itself first.
One can see through Google the numerous fish pens along the Pantal and Calmay rivers. Note the Pantal river is only less than 50 meters wide near the bend (where Philippine Long Distance is) and it is heavily silted by the fish pen operation. If you approach the adjoining municipalities, their first question will be “Are you not the one causing the problem yourself?
However there is always a solution, a very difficult to almost impossible mission, and it also requires involvement of provincial and national governments. The solution must be undertaken as a large national urban renewal and flood control project. Since there will be hundreds of competing national projects as a result of the recent flooding of the entire Luzon area, funding is a big problem. Even if funding is available, the CORRUPTION that exists poses even a greater problem.
The solution is to jail the CORRUPT, PERIOD. Until such time that the corrupt mentality is changed, the solutions to these similar problems may not happen in our lifetime because the funds will be drained.
As I have said before, the “smart” engineers and the corrupt politicians are really in for their pockets. They create problems and slowly solve the them. The raising of the roads with inadequate drainage system is a classic example of the “smart” engineers solution like the one in Tapuac-Lucao. The ultimate solution to these problems is the political will of those in power. Hopefully they are not as CORRUPT as GMA. It cannot be done by us going back there or the investment of Jerry, Joe and Juan or the “engineering by chance” as someone had suggested.
Maybe the smart “technical working group” of the tri-city ferryboat service is correct after all. Use the ferry boat for local transportation during the rainy months when there are no tourists, but they must use low-draft boat, not the mono-hull that someone says it is stable like the aircraft carrier.
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