‘Until we learn to build with memory and a lasting lesson, not just money, our cities will continue to drown. Not just in water. But in waste, delay, denial, and the myth that a better future can wait for the next quarter.’
OVER the weekend and well into yesterday, Manila and her neighboring lungs, Quezon City, Valenzuela, Pasig and Bulacan, gasped under a siege of unrelenting rain. The skies opened without pause, suspending not only classes and government work but also the rhythm of daily life. In these moments, even the most intimate routines – buying breakfast, fetching a child from school, getting home become feats of endurance.
And while the rains have poured down in near-kilometric volumes, so too have our rivers swelled and our roads drowned. Commuters from northern Manila and as far as Calumpit or Bocaue found themselves stranded for hours, marooned on highways while their own homes, paradoxically, remained dry. The danger wasn’t in their destination but in the very journey.
As of this writing, more than P50 million in aid has already been dispatched by the national government to afflicted LGUs, a generous gesture, and yet, one that has become ritualistic. Rain falls, flood rises, aid comes. We who know how to shade ballots and recite constitutions yet still somehow cannot escape the inundation that haunts our capital every monsoon.
Flooding is not new to this archipelago. Even during the Spanish era, Manila’s chronicles swelled with stories of rivers spilling their banks, waters rushing into markets and churches. But it was under American rule that an ambitious plan emerged to tame both water and chaos. Architect Daniel Burnham, the same mind who reshaped Chicago after its great fire, arrived in Manila with a vision: to bring the City Beautiful Movement to the tropics. He saw Manila not as a colony, but as a canvas, ripe for order, symmetry, and dignity. His plans sketched out grand boulevards, dignified public buildings, generous open spaces, and most crucially, living esteros that functioned as part of a natural water system, flowing gracefully into the Pasig River and out to Manila Bay. Burnham knew that beauty was not mere ornamentation; it was resilience. A beautiful city was one where form served function, and where natural systems were not buried but embraced. In his Manila, floods would not drown the city because the city would breathe with its waters. But we outpaced his plans before we ever fulfilled them.
In the postwar rush to rebuild, then to modernize, we distorted Burnham’s vision. The esteros were narrowed, concretized, or covered altogether. Communities grew on floodplains. Informal settlements clung to canal walls. Roads were built wider, but not higher. We turned waterways into waste bins and then wondered why they no longer flowed. Burnham’s Manila remained mostly on paper while our reality today is knee-deep in neglect.
A 2024 World Bank review of the Metro Manila Flood Management Project notes that only 16 of 34 aging pumping stations have been rehabilitated so far. New ones are in the pipeline, but timelines stretch, like floodwaters in the night. Meanwhile, climate change is doubling the intensity of typhoons. When Super Typhoon Carina struck in July 2024, it dumped over 300 mm of rainfall in just 24 hours, enough to paralyze transport, drown homes, and turn avenues into estuaries. Despite a P244.6 billion flood control budget, our drainage systems remain overwhelmed, clogged by plastic waste, hemmed in by unchecked construction, and strained by an urban metabolism faster than its lungs can breathe.
But perhaps the most tragic flood is the one we fail to see: the one that drowns our potential.
Just weeks ago, the Philippines fell short by only $26 of being reclassified as an Upper Middle-Income Country by the World Bank. A mere $26. A number so small it could vanish into a meager supply of groceries. And yet, it lingers like a watermark, proof that our ambitions remain fragile. That measly $26 is a symbol: a quiet echo of our social immaturity, our inability to turn development into direction. We speak of progress yet chase it in circles. We write plans as long as rivers, and yet when the rains come, we are always surprised.
And what’s worse, we begin to accept it. Flooding becomes part of our calendar, part of our commute, part of our conversations, like it belongs here, like it is written into the DNA of our daily lives. But this quiet acceptance is dangerous. To normalize flooding is to accept a wicked reality as unchangeable. It is to resign ourselves to dysfunction, to believe that suffering in waist-deep water is just another form of civic patience. It is not. It should never be.
We often celebrate Filipino resilience in the face of disaster as if it were a virtue forged in mud and misery. But when resilience becomes an excuse for poor service, it ceases to be noble. It becomes exploitative. Every time we glorify the barefoot man pushing a kariton through waist-deep water, or the child swimming to school, we are not praising heroism; we are romanticizing abandonment. We are stealing from Filipinos the very dignity and infrastructure they deserve as citizens of a great, if often mismanaged, nation.
Flooding, then, is not just a symptom of heavy rainfall. It is a lasting exposition, a mirror reflecting a country still caught between vision and execution, between blueprint and street corner, between the sunny thought of progress and the drenched weight of its reality.
This, perhaps, is the heart of it: We dream in dry-season ambition but govern in rainy-season amnesia.
Until we learn to build with memory and a lasting lesson, not just money, our cities will continue to drown. Not just in water. But in waste, delay, denial, and the myth that a better future can wait for the next quarter.
