NOAH and the deluge of politics

By Herman M. Lagon

There are storms that soak us, and storms that should sober us. Typhoon Tino did both. Cebu’s grief—cars stacked like toys, homes swallowed whole, families torn from roofs—asked a hard question: why did this happen despite warnings? As Typhoon Uwan now churns in, that question should not fade with the floodwater. It should take us back to 2017, when the government shut down Project NOAH for “lack of funds,” as if you toss the umbrella the moment the drizzle stops.

Project NOAH—born in 2012 after Sendong—was not just a website with pretty maps. It was a working shield: sensors on rivers, LiDAR-based flood models, barangay-level hazard maps, and six-hour lead time for communities to act. It gave teachers something better than “bahala na” and mayors something stronger than gut feel. I remember showing my students how a blue contour on a map could mean the difference between evacuation tonight or regret tomorrow. For a while, we had a science habit worth keeping.

Then the funding dried up. Scientists who built and ran the system in 2012 waited months for pay; some left; many stayed out of quiet duty. The University of the Philippines threw a lifesaver and adopted the program in 2017, folding it into the UP Resilience Institute so the public could still use the data, free and open (Enano, 2017; UP Resilience Institute, 2017). DPWH later said its engineers would consult those maps for no-build zones and permits (Rappler, 2018). That was good housekeeping, yes—but it also felt like patching a roof you previously chose to tear off.

Tino exposed what happens when we treat science as optional and politics as weatherproof. Over 400 flood-control structures in Cebu reportedly “failed” under pressure; some were ghost projects, others built where rivers needed room to breathe. As “corruption kills” trended, you could feel a country realizing that water follows gravity and money follows influence—and both can bury a town. NOAH’s maps had long flagged these risks. But a ribbon-cutting on a dike still gets more airtime than a quiet dashboard warning you to move the backhoe five meters left.

Uwan is our reminder that preparedness is not a speech; it is a system. The World Bank estimates every dollar spent on risk reduction saves at least six in response and recovery. Meanwhile, the country has topped the World Risk Report’s global disaster-risk ranking for three straight years. Those are not scare tactics; they are receipts. If we center politics over physics, we pay twice—first in budgets, then in funerals.

Here is what “science first” looks like on the ground. In 2025, the UP NOAH Center updated flood maps by blending satellite data, field surveys, and crowdsourced photos from Facebook and X during Typhoon Carina. Barangay officials walked sitios with tablets, marking flood heights beside sari-sari stores and chapels. Teachers pulled the maps in homeroom to discuss safe routes. Fisherfolk checked rainfall while mending nets. None of that makes headlines, but that is how lives are actually saved: a thousand small decisions made with better information.

For educators, NOAH is a lesson plan that never gets old. It proves that compassion without knowledge is helpless, and knowledge without compassion is useless. When students in Jaro or La Paz examine their own street on a hazard map, risk stops being abstract. They ask sharper questions: “Where does this water want to go?” “Whose house is in the way?” “What can we change before the next landfall?” That habit—of noticing, weighing, and acting for the common good—is the sort of leadership a city needs when the rain does not ask permission.

Of course, maps do not pour cement, and dashboards do not clean canals. But they tell us where to build, where not to build, who to move, and when to move them. They keep projects honest. They expose shortcuts. And they make us admit a simple truth: nature-based fixes—mangroves, catchment basins, river easements—often do more, and cost less, than vanity walls. As geologist Mahar Lagmay keeps saying, concrete should complement nature, not fight it. Uwan will test whether we have learned that.

Policy needs to catch up with common sense. Keep NOAH’s tools and innovation plans fully funded and fully public. Tie flood-control budgets to independently validated risk models. Require contractors to publish pre- and post-project hazard layers, not just glossy tarps. Reward LGUs that use data in drills, zoning, and school safety plans; penalize those that build where rivers used to run. In short, let science decide the where and when, then let politics negotiate the how and how fast.

Tino’s wake and Uwan’s approach form a blunt sentence: warnings only work when listened to. Project NOAH should never have had to lobby for relevance. It was never about forecasting rain alone; it was about forecasting responsibility. The ark has always been data, freely shared and properly used. The choice—every typhoon season—is whether we climb aboard together, or argue on the shore while the waters rise.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a “student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.