FIRING LINE: Rainy days and flood days

FIRING LINE: Rainy days and flood days

By Robert B. Roque Jr. | June 9, 2026

School Year 2026-2027 is in, and so is the rainy season in the country. And for all its worth, the Marcos Junior administration deserves credit for at least being honest about one thing: it is not making a promise it cannot keep.

Exactly a week ago, Malacañang admitted that it cannot guarantee a flood-free rainy season this year. Its assurance, instead, is that floodwaters will recede faster, drainage systems will work better, and government agencies are doing what they can to lessen the damage.

Does that sound even a tad convincing? Well, it pays to be seen.

Meantime, what government can stop or should have stopped long ago is the corruption, neglect, and political patronage that turned flood control into one of the country’s most lucrative public works scams.

Successive administrations, lawmakers, governors, mayors, and public works officials poured hundreds of billions into flood mitigation. And now our government is spending more taxpayer money to go after those who siphoned funds from flood control projects.

That may be the proper recourse — make the crooks accountable. However, with allocations for flood control projects frozen due to unresolved past anomalies, submerged neighborhoods remain vulnerable to more severe flooding because solutions are no longer funded.

In Metro Manila alone, flood woes are the product of decades of poor planning colliding with geography and climate realities. And whatever happened to the Metro Manila Flood Management Master Plan, a roughly ₱352-billion blueprint unveiled in 2012?

More than a decade later, many of its major components remain unfinished or delayed while the government continues costly catch-up dredging and declogging operations.

For Dr. Mahar Lagmay of Project NOAH, the answer is not simply more anti-flood infrastructure. The country must shift from chasing the illusion of absolute flood control toward smarter flood management — protecting watersheds, creating detention basins and green spaces, giving rivers room to breathe, and planning entire drainage basins as one interconnected system.

In a report by GMA News, the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities cited how the Philippines could lose more than ₱7.6 trillion in economic damages between 2022 and 2050 if persistent flooding remains unresolved.

With about 20 typhoons entering the country each year and extreme weather becoming more severe, the old playbook of dikes, pumping stations, and emergency dredging is clearly no longer enough.

The challenge now is for national agencies, local governments, and the private sector — particularly major property developers and infrastructure builders — to move beyond piecemeal projects and work in unison on genuine flood resilience: upgraded and unclogged drainage networks, retention and detention ponds, watershed rehabilitation, spillways, green infrastructure, and smarter urban planning.

Until flood control becomes a coordinated national mission, we parents will have to toughen up our kids – the generation of students who not only have to be educated in academics, but also schooled in navigating the consequences of government failure every rainy season.

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