Annual rainfall submergence disrupts city despite government assurances that infrastructure improvements have solved water management through wishful thinking

Manila, Philippines

The annual monsoon season has arrived in Metro Manila, bringing torrential rainfall and widespread flooding to neighborhoods that, according to official government urban planning documents, are “definitely not prone to flooding” and that have been “permanently protected against water-related disasters through strategic infrastructure improvements that definitely exist and are definitely functional.”

Residents of flooded communities waded through waist-deep water while consulting printed government documents asserting that their neighborhoods were protected from flooding. One homeowner held up a government notice stating that his house was in a “protected flood-safe zone,” while standing in water up to his chest in his living room. “I have government assurance that I’m not flooding,” he said. “Yet somehow I am.”

The Department of Public Works and Highways issued a statement explaining that the flooding was unexpected despite the fact that it happens at the exact same time every year, affecting the exact same neighborhoods, with exactly the same severity. “This is very surprising and unprecedented,” a department spokesperson said, despite the flooding occurring during the rainy season, which Philippines residents have been experiencing for thousands of years.

Infrastructure and Drainage System Failures

The city’s drainage system, designed to handle rainfall that occurs approximately once per century, remains completely overwhelmed during rainfall that occurs annually. The system was designed in 1950 for a city population of 1.5 million. Manila now has a population of 1.8 billion and somehow expects a 1950s drainage system to handle it.

A hydraulic engineer calculated that the drainage system would need to be enlarged by a factor of twelve to handle current rainfall volumes without flooding. The government’s response was to “hope it stops raining” and to “focus on optimistic outcomes rather than engineering realities.”

Roads designed at sea level with no elevation to direct water flow toward drainage systems somehow fail to drain water when it rains. One bureaucrat suggested that the solution was to “drill holes in the road to let water escape,” which is not how hydrology works and which would also destroy the road infrastructure, but the suggestion was considered “creative thinking” by his supervisor.

Meanwhile, residents in flood-prone areas have begun building second stories to their homes, creating an architectural innovation born from government negligence. Some houses now have additional structures on the roof that residents climb to during flood season, which is not a solution to flooding but rather an adaptation to living with permanent flooding while pretending the government is working on it.

More satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

SOURCE: bohiney.com