The ghost of drainage past

We are drowning in our own backyard. The water is thick with old promises.

A heavy afternoon downpour turns Iloilo City into a wading pool. To understand why, listen to City Engineer Mavi Gustilo. She delivered her recent admission with bureaucratic calm. It should sound alarms. The city is still “gradually developing a drainage layout” because our current networks lack connectivity to main outfalls and pumping stations.

We operate on disjointed infrastructure. One barangay’s drainage system effectively ignores the next.

This goes beyond an engineering oversight. It is a generational failure of leadership. Decades ago, former Mayor Jerry Treñas campaigned on a sweeping promise of a comprehensive drainage master plan. Voters bought the silver bullet. They were tired of rolling up their pants to cross the street. Fast forward to today under Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu. That master plan remains a plan. We lack a unified circulatory system beneath our streets. We have disconnected concrete arteries bleeding into dead ends instead.

The numbers prove it. The 2017 Iloilo City Comprehensive Drainage Plan put the cost at PHP 6.2 billion. By September 2022, Rep. Julienne Baronda told a House budget hearing that PHP 500 million of it had been released. Last November, Councilor Rex Sarabia, who chairs the appropriations committee, said the city had no flood master plan of its own and not a peso earmarked for flood projects in 2026. And in August, Gustilo said the plan was still at the feasibility study stage. So the “gradual” development she described last week is a study of a plan first costed nine years ago.

We get what Gustilo aptly calls “palliative measures.” Band-aids on a severed limb.

The city’s declogging operations remain a massive and thankless undertaking for workers on the ground. Personnel from the General Services Office and the Infrastructure and Facility Conservation Office recently dragged 2.6 tons of waste out of the Sinikway drainage system. They pulled out a broken refrigerator, tricycles, and a sofa.

Infuriating civic hypocrisy is at play here. People demand immediate flood relief from the government while blocking their own drains with household appliances. Voluntary Saturday cleanups are noble. They fail to cure a cultural habit of treating waterways like a personal landfill.

Yet we cannot let local officials use our bad habits as an excuse for broken promises.

Reactive cleanups mask the failure of a grand political vision. Hauling a chicken coop out of a canal in La Paz creates good optics for a weekend press release. It fails to fix the structural deficit we were promised would disappear a decade ago. It distracts from the reality that our local infrastructure is fundamentally piecemeal.

We can pull endless discarded sofas out of the Lapuz district. We can organize a hundred Saturday cleanup drives and applaud the recovered tonnage. None of it changes the structural reality beneath our feet.

The ghost of that comprehensive master plan must materialize into connected and functioning concrete. Otherwise, we will never solve the flooding crisis. We are scooping water out of a sinking ship with a very tired spoon.