The Philippines as a Water Country: Implications for Physical Planning

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In a country of thousand islands, you’ll have water: tons and tons of it. If all this water isn’t stocked, used, harnessed and conserved, you’ll have problems: more tons and tons of it, as in floods, or so few tons of it, as in drought. The recent history of the Philippines is an exciting tale of the power and terror of water.

My ancestral home stands next to a creek, which during heavy rains overflows its banks and floods a “delta” that it forms with the Danio branch of the San Francisco River. This delta, which is actually a flood plain for both creek and river, was once a lush greenland of wild fruits and trees, and nesting ground for wild birds and reptiles (it was near the water, after all).

Fortunately for our home, it stands on the left bank of the creek, which from its channel bed slopes steeply upwards, so that the rising floodwaters are pushed back to the delta, which results in its annual flooding and submergence.

That there is no limit to the rapacity of man in his relentless quest to extend his settlement into green habitats is now confirmed by the fact that the delta has now been populated densely, mostly by informal settlers. What has been my father’s hunting grounds, our picnic spots, the scenes of our youthful excursions for fruit picking, tree climbing, and jungle games is now crowded with makeshift shanties on the banks of the creek and the river, with sturdier but ugly structures of hollow blocks and tin walls and roofs on the higher flatlands.

I remember the first day when the “squatters” came, and being dismayed at how quickly their colony stood in irregular rows and columns of a variety of flimsy material: plywood and stones, some hollow blocks and tins everywhere, shattering the sunlight, and throwing it in our faces. I was horrified when the unpaved street that we used to walk through to the public school was filled with plastic covered and uncovered feces, so that children from the neighboring barangays had to tip toe and meander side to side just to get through. Of course, the delta’s green quickly disappeared , and the remains became brown, sometimes burned, othertimes used as firewood and incorporated as housing materials.

But the creek and the river struck back vindictively, and punished this wanton despoliation. Within weeks, heretofore unexperienced heights of floodwaters came, and flung back all the horrid waste back. Because the new structures that stood along the banks of both creek and river prevented their quiet overflow and eventual joining over the delta, the now bare delta was fully submerged after a few hours of rain, throwing back feces and rotten waste back into makeshift salas, kitchens and bedrooms.

Gradually, because the now confined flow of the creek and the river dug ever deeper into their channel beds, the gently meandering, giggling brookwaters were soon transformed by the slightest rain into roaring, rushing flows, rage filled, slamming into anything solid that stood in their way. During these times, children who were once used to play along the banks were caught by surprise by these onrushes, and some were pulled into the greater and deeper river, soon drowned. Even grown men who were caught in these onrushes were swept down after a brief struggle, and their corpses were later found along the banks of the San Francisco river, bloated and water soaked.

Oh water, life-giving element! How quickly your merry disposition transforms into vengeful hatred. Now, every time it rains heavily, I see FEAR in my neighbors’ faces, white with worry for their homes and furniture, and terrified of the many microbial life the waters bear and fling into the homes of Barangay Kati___, the name of the local settlement on the erstwhile delta. For the former colonizers, so brave and daring, have become the prey of waterborne diseases, and the sodden filth which the floodwaters fling back into the inner spaces of their homes and minds.