IT IS about time that our councilors take time to go around the areas that are regularly flooded in Davao City. They must tour the places and ask the help of engineering experts to pinpoint exactly where the water from the city’s creeks and rivers spills over when heavy rains fall. That is the only way they can come up with proposed flood mitigation project/s that will address the exact core of the problem.
Say, if the Lipadas River water swells as usual when heavy rains in the upland areas occur, their on-the-scene presence during days when a flood happens can provide them knowledge of where exactly the spread of the water to the community begins. Therefore, with the assistance of engineering experts, they will get an idea of what appropriate project to propose and what regulatory measures to stringently apply.
Moreover, their personal knowledge of how floods occur in the city’s lowland plains can give them the best inputs in implementing regulations to development programs coming from the private sectors, more specifically, real estate and residential subdivision developers.
For now, it is clear that the flooding problem is the end result of our policy-making body’s “flexibility” in approving land development in the city. Many of Davao’s agricultural areas in fact have been converted into residential, commercial, and industrial zones. These are all thanks to what we wrote in yesterday’s column on the cutting down of coconut trees to give way to large privately initiated tri-end residential subdivision enclaves. The areas for those projects are almost always just a little away from the routes of the city’s major rivers and creeks.
Of course, we can only assume that the developers have the permits from proper agencies like the LGU, the Housing and Land Use Regulatory Board (HLURB) the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)), and others. The question is how they got the approval.
It appears, however, that in approving new subdivision projects, the city’s policymakers are not fully serious about letting the developers comply with the regulations. Allowing developers to scrape open hillsides or include in areas to be developed river banks simply does not need much imagining of the consequences. Just go up to Ma-a road from the C.P. Garcia Diversion highway. Where does the unabsorbed water from the totally deforested hillsides both left and right of the barangay road go? Where will the eroded soil be brought by the rainwater but to the Davao River and other nearby creeks?
Very soon not a single Maa resident can feign surprise if a massive flood hits the barangay. Or, they cannot just shrug off their shoulders when authorities call for immediate evacuation from their houses.
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Whoever dragged the name of former President Rodrigo R. Duterte into the issue of government destabilization must have miscalculated the country’s former head. Either the group is thinking that insinuating a Duterte participation in the destabilization plan can enhance its capacity to convince more to join them, or the group of alleged retired top military and police generals want to stoke fire to the rift between Vice President Sara Duterte and House Speaker Martin Romualdez with the end-goal of weakening the Marcos administration.
This is our reading of the statement of former Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) acting Secretary Eliseo Rio (Ret) who emphasized in his media interview that the Duterte-Romualdez row is what is destabilizing the government and not his group
As to FPRRD being a member of the “plotters,” Rio’s group could be entertaining the notion that dragging Duterte’s name would give the group better chances of drawing more adherents to their cause because it was FPRRD who lifted the salaries of the men in uniform many times over.
In contrast, the first major act of his successor PBBM is to have the uniform men’s retirement package looked into and adjusted, with the men in uniformed service in active duty possibly paying a share in the retirement fund accumulation.
