ALTHOUGH it is unacceptable, whichever way we look at it, flooding in Metro Manila has become such a regular occurrence that even Metropolitan Manila Development Authority Chairman Francis N. Tolentino has conceded that the metropolis would never be able to avoid it.
Metro Manila, it seems, is doomed to be submerged at the first sign of a drizzle, and this scenario seems to be getting worse every year.
Although the Insurance Commission has no data that directly relate to vehicle damage inflicted by floods, losses incurred because of so-called acts of nature amounted to P334,707,914 in 2013, representing 5.13 percent of the total car business. This amount is deemed significant and upsetting, even if it covers very little of the total losses incurred by the car-insurance industry, which amounted to P6.5 billion that year. These figures are even more staggering and alarming once we realize that they represent only losses involving motor vehicles and do not yet include the damage to public infrastructure and houses.
The flooding we regularly experience in our dear country should really not come as a surprise if we consider the type and quality of our sewers: undeniably obsolete, totally neglected and unfairly ignored all these years. In most European countries, you can walk through their storm sewers. In fact, if you are daring enough, you could even drive your car through them and come out unscathed. That’s how wide their sewers are, and you simply cannot compare their sewerage systems with ours. In the Philippines we keep our sewers small—a horrible truth, which I am simply unable to either defend or justify.
Like the Philippines, Japan is regularly battered by typhoons. In Tokyo and Saitama prefecture, which is about 15 miles north of the Japanese capital, the people there built an amazing underground surge tank that collects floodwaters. After the rain ceases, the collected floodwaters are then pumped slowly into rivers. This has been proven so effective in combating chronic flooding that Tokyo and Saitama are now considered flood-resistant.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Floodway system is the world’s largest solution to flooding. The underground surge tank is capable of storing floodwaters at the rate of five Olympic swimming pools per minute. It collects 260 cubic yards of water every second. It is so cavernous, you can even call it an underground Megamall, due to their comparable sizes. Its surge tank is about 580 feet long, 256 ft wide and 59 ft high. Connected to it are about 3.7 miles of tunnels. After the rain stops, the floodwaters are then pumped into the Edo River by underground pumping stations without causing the river to overflow. The pumping system is powered by four turbines of jet engines, which are quite similar to those used to fly a Boeing 737 plane.
In 1991 a typhoon struck Japan, flooding 24,000 acres of land and 30,000 homes around Tokyo. As part of a firm resolve to prevent such a disaster from happening again, the construction of several gigantic surge tanks was started two years later. After they were completed in 2006, the total cost of the project was determined to be about $2.9 billion—an obviously expensive government venture, but also a very wise public-infrastructure investment. You may very well be curious to visit this structure (if only to find out what our country has been missing all these years), but you won’t find it so easily, for it is underneath a soccer field.
In Saitama a similar system is in place. It is called the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel. Gigantic concrete silos measuring 65 meters (213 ft) tall and 32 meters (105 ft) wide collect the floodwaters. Each is about as tall as a five-story building. Connected to each one are underground tunnels measuring 6.4 kilometers, which were built 50 meters (164 ft) under the ground. There are also gigantic tanks: 25.4 meters tall, 177 meters long and 78 meters wide, with 59 concrete columns. The underground discharge channel has been revered as an aesthetically significant architectural structure, making it a well-known tourist attraction in the region.
Building a sensible sewerage system is not new to the Japanese. The Kanda Sewerage, built in the Kanda area of Tokyo in 1884, was Japan’s first modern sewerage system. The built sewers are so wide that you can drive a 6×6 truck through it. Considering that this system was built more than a hundred years ago, comparing it to our supposedly “modern” sewerage system in 2014 should be treated as a not-so-amusing pun directed at us and as a huge insult to the people of Japan.
While the Philippines continues to mope over its chronic flooding problem, Japan refuses to wallow in its own, despite the ever-aggravating nature of our global climate. At the moment, Tokyo is preoccupied with building a water-storage facility capable of absorbing 75 millimeters of rainfall per hour around the Ginza district. Meanwhile, Metro Manila remains at the mercy of its Spanish-period sewers. While Japan is exhausting efforts to resolve recurring flooding, Filipinos can only wait until the next typhoon wreaks havoc on the nation and pray that the aftermath won’t be as bad as the ones we have experienced before.
Despite our pessimism, there must be some hope in solving our flooding problem. While we need not build an exact replica of the Japanese sewerage system, we could try to replicate what they have accomplished on a significantly smaller scale. In this way, although we may not be able to completely overcome the damaging forces of Mother Nature, we can, at the very least, confidently defend ourselves from her attacks long enough to enjoy even just one floodless rainy day.
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Atty. Dennis B. Funa is the deputy commissioner for legal services of the Insurance Commission.