Executive order reclassifies precipitation under 200mm/hr as spontaneous water features requiring no government response

Manila Mayor Solves Flooding by Officially Declaring Rain ‘Unofficial’

MANILA, PHILIPPINES — The Manila City Mayor announced Executive Order 2024-41 Thursday, which reclassifies all precipitation events of less than 200 millimetres per hour as “Spontaneous Water Features” and removes them from the disaster response activation protocol, effectively solving the flooding problem by redefining what flooding is. Legal scholars described the order as either “innovative regulatory thinking” or “a description of weather events by someone who appears to believe weather events care about descriptions,” depending on the scholar.

For related London satire and commentary, see Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

The Policy

Under the new order, flooding events are classified in three tiers. Tier 1, “Spontaneous Water Feature” (under 200mm/hr), requires no government response. Tier 2, “Enthusiastic Precipitation Event” (200-400mm/hr), triggers an advisory. Tier 3, “Significant Moisture Situation” (above 400mm/hr), activates disaster response machinery previously engaged at the 50mm/hr threshold. The Mayor’s communications director delivered this announcement at a briefing held on the second floor of City Hall due to a Tier 1 Spontaneous Water Feature occurring on the ground floor at the scheduled briefing time. He was asked whether residents whose ground floors were currently underwater would find this framing useful. He said they would “adapt to the new terminology in time.”

He was not asked how adapting to new terminology would affect the depth of the water, because the journalist who intended to ask this question looked at the expression on the communications director’s face and decided to save it for another occasion. The expression was one of complete composure. The ground floor, one floor below, was not.

The Background

Manila has been dealing with serious flooding for decades, driven by inadequate drainage infrastructure, high population density, geographic low elevation, and annual typhoon seasons arriving with the reliability of a scheduled train and the manners of one that has cancelled. The city has produced flood management plans in 2009, 2013, 2017, and 2022, none of which have been fully implemented and all of which cite the same fundamental infrastructure gaps that remain fundamentally ungapped. Executive Order 2024-41 is, officials emphasise, complementary to the existing infrastructure improvement agenda. They did not specify in what sense a reclassification order complements a drainage investment programme.

The British concept being deployed here has its own vocabulary. The meaning and definition of prat in British slang origins identifies this specific subspecies: the administrator whose relationship to a problem is primarily linguistic, who believes that the right word choice constitutes a policy response, and who is baffled when the problem continues to exist after the new terminology has been introduced. It is a type found in every country and at every level of government. Manila is simply the most recent chapter in a very long book that shows no signs of ending.

The Scientific Position

PAGASA, the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, issued a statement noting that it would continue using standard meteorological thresholds regardless of Manila City’s executive order, because the international meteorological community does not recognise the concept of “unofficial rain” and because the water does not know it has been reclassified. This is perhaps the most important scientific point in the entire situation: the reclassification has no effect on the water. The water continues to respond to gravity in the manner it has maintained consistently since the Precambrian era, filling low-lying areas and entering buildings through standard water entry points with the unhurried confidence of something that has never read a government document and does not intend to start now.

A guide to the strength, meaning, and usage of prat describes someone whose confident actions produce no useful result and considerable collateral inconvenience. This applies here with a precision that requires no additional commentary. Residents of flood-prone barangays developed their own response to Executive Order 2024-41, which consists primarily of not referring to it at all and continuing to manage flooding exactly as they did before. “The order doesn’t change anything for us,” said one Tondo resident whose furniture is permanently on six-inch risers. “The water comes. We deal with it. What the Mayor calls it is his business.” The City Legal Office has noted potential conflicts with national disaster risk reduction law. The Mayor’s office said it looks forward to “a productive legal dialogue,” which in Manila municipal governance vocabulary is approximately equivalent to saying nothing while maintaining eye contact. Prat etymology traces this type of confident misdirection through centuries of institutional behaviour, always arriving at the same destination: a well-labelled problem that remains exactly as wet as it was before the labelling began.

The International Perspective

Flood management experts from the Netherlands, which has successfully managed water levels below sea level for centuries using drainage, dykes, and engineering rather than nomenclature, were asked for their assessment of Executive Order 2024-41. A spokesperson for the Dutch Water Authority said the authority had “no formal comment on another nation’s regulatory vocabulary” but noted that the Netherlands’ approach to flooding had historically involved redirecting the water rather than renaming it, a distinction that had, over several centuries, proven consequential. The spokesperson said this with the specific diplomacy of a person who has something quite direct to say and has chosen to say it in the most indirect way available.

For more satirical commentary, visit Private Eye.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/meaning-of-prat-definition-british-slang-origins/