blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

Dear Chris You were never my student in Environmental Science 1 but some of your classmates from Malcolm Hall were. One of them told me the tale of the floating car before I saw it plastered on Facebook! But despite you being taken for a fool, I don't think you really are! You were just one exasperated taxpayer! As I have written earlier, Metro Manila is an extremely dangerous urban environment where the mere act of using the streets as a pedestrian or as a motorist (as you have found out to your humiliation by an unkind Pinoy social networking community) can kill! Example: At one flooded street in Manila, several people were reported to have been electrocuted when they held on to a fancy lamp post for support during a flood. It appeared that the lamp post had no insulation that makes them "all weather"! I heard you are about to take the Bar and some of my lawyer friends hope that you will pass so that ALL will be informed (the networks included). But more than th...

Almost every year I teach an undergraduate course in environmental science where towards the end of the semester we discuss relevant issues. In the first half of the semester we discuss and learn about the physical and biological processes that make the environment an interesting thing to observe and in the latter half, we deal with how we poor humans have to deal with a changing environment using our 1) wits and 2) technology! It is no secret that Metro Manila is one of the most dangerous urban environments to live in. Architects and city planners Paulo Alcazaren and Gerard Lico have written so much about how Metro Manila's unplanned urban sprawl, booming population and bad governance has made the problem worse. The two gentlemen have pointed out that these problems bedeviled Manilans even in the Spanish colonial period, except then, there were only less than a million Manilans compared to the 13-14 million today. Thus in a time of rainfall shifts, a moderate downpour of 10-15 ...

The Philippine Daily Inquirer writes an op ed Sodden welcome about the La Nina enhanced Easterlies that have been wrecking havoc on the eastern seaboards of the region even into Australia. Queensland, Australia is now experiencing floods which its non-believer Prime Minister Julia Gillard described as of "biblical proportions" Gillard has personally seen the disaster which now has shut down Brisbane. While the Sydneysiders and Melburnians are hundreds of kilometres from the flood zone, all my mates from those cities don't think they won't get flooded. They are concerned. The PDI complains that the Manila-centric Noynoy administration has not shown the requisite urgency in dealing with the matter. Mr Noynoy Aquino has yet to set foot or fly over flood stricken Southern Leyte or even in nearer Albay. If he had, the press didn't get wind of it and neither have we seen the press photos. Mrs Arroyo steps into a disaster zone, I think it is Malacanang P...

Buendia during Ondoy? No Orchard Road last June 16! Photo credits from http://www.about-knowledge.com/orchard-road-flood/ Typhoon Ondoy (Ketsana) will be memorable for me since it flooded my house and sending my techie gadgets to the computer in the sky. Also I was trapped in Quezon City, at a charismatic church where I helped evacuees get some assistance with three medical students from UERM medical school who were to report for duty in the hospital, but couldn't. By then UERM hospital was up to its second floor in flood. The polluted San Juan River burst its banks.  I could not forget the long line of schoolchildren with drums and bugles as they were in school for a show when the flood struck and sank their school. But many people lost more in terms of property and worse in lives.  While damaged houses can be repaired, IPods, flat screen TVs and Digicams can be replaced by "cooler" models, a human life lost to the floods cannot be replaced. The blurbs today mark th...

To understand the magnitude of the recent floods that hit Manila and northern Luzon in the wake of TS Ondoy (Ketsana), it pays to look at the historical record of flooding in the Philippines. There had been major flooding events before and some have been recorded in Spanish friar accounts. Floods regularly inundated Bulacan, Pampanga and Pangasinan as well as the Laguna de Bay area. Marikina was flooded at certain years and this endangered the colony's food security that residents of these areas had to ask for exemption from the hated colonial tribute. Researchers may well try to see if these flooding events are somewhat related to climate events such as El Nino or La Nina. Also they may take note of how long the floods lasted before it subsided. One very documented flood is the one that deluged Manila in November 1943. This is so significant that all writers of WWII memoirs recall it since it marked the start of the worst aspects of the Japanese occupation. The flood deluged part...