Pampanga town holds key to NLEx’s battle with flood

(First of two parts)

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, PAMPANGA, Philippines — While her neighbors at Barangay Santa Monica in San Simon, Pampanga, queued for food packs as 0.60-meter (2-foot-deep) floodwaters receded last week, Bella Parungao scouted for an apartment to relocate to in the meantime.

“[Our community] received all the miseries,” Parungao, 40, said in Kapampangan.

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The widespread and prolonged flooding on the heels of monsoon rains and typhoons since Aug. 2 had brought health hazards, lack of food, loss of income and potential business closures. At its worst, 303, or 60 percent, of 505 villages in Pampanga were flooded on Aug. 31.

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On the same day, 10 of 14 barangays in San Simon were submerged when the Tulaoc River, a tributary of the Pampanga River, overflowed and spilled to sections of North Luzon Expressway (NLEx), dragging traffic on the vital highway for up to 12 hours.

Parungao’s village of Santa Monica was among the hardest hit by the monsoon rains. For the first time, the village experienced floods that lasted four weeks, with 0.91-meter (3-foot-deep) waters still submerging her home on Sept. 13.

READ: Parts of NLEX, MacArthur Highway, Bulacan roads impassable due to floods

Along Quezon Road, the stretch of San Simon’s industrial zone, flood was neck-deep, even as the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) raised it by up to 1.2 meters (3.93 feet) in 2008. The NLEx segment beside Quezon Road dammed the waters, barring it from spilling to the other side of the tollway.

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“Back then, water pooled on farms, drying in two days,” Parungao recalled the time when her grandfather Urbano worked on the lands.

“It is as if the world has changed. There was no dry land,” said Parungao, who works as a virtual assistant.

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The dredging of Tulaoc River by the San Miguel Corp., as well as sheet piling, sandbagging, use of modular barriers and pumping out of water by NLEX Corp., the DPWH and the Pampanga provincial government, succeeded in draining the water out of the San Simon interchange and Tulaoc sections, and hastened the restoration of the flow of traffic, especially the truckloads of vegetables coming from the Cordillera region.

However, six of San Simon’s barangays remained flooded as of Sept. 20, a Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office report said, citing “continuous rainfall and overflowing of the Pampanga River” as the main cause.

Pooling the water of some 30 minor river systems, the Pampanga River has a drainage area of some 10,434 square kilometers, snaking some 270 kilometers from the highlands of Central Luzon to northern Manila Bay. Along its path are towns in Pampanga’s second and fourth congressional districts, like San Simon, that lie at the delta, which two Filipino geologists found to be sinking by two to eight centimeters yearly, adding to their vulnerability to flooding.

Priority

Easing the flood in San Simon town appeared to be the DPWH’s immediate priority, it being the key to stopping the floods along NLEx, formerly the North Diversion Road, which was built in 1962.

The agency is building three “water detention basins” in the town, two of which measure at least 33 hectares (ha) building, to store water and later drain for irrigation.

Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon presented this plan in a Sept. 9 meeting with town mayors in the fourth district.

Dizon said President Marcos had ordered him to “protect the NLEx” because the toll road is the ‘backbone” of Central and northern Luzon.

NLEx provides access to the Clark Freeport, which hosts many manufacturing companies and base of government and private disaster response agencies, Clark International Airport, the present alternative to Ninoy Aquino International Airport and home to cargo hubs, and the New Clark City, identified as an alternate government center in case a strong earthquake hits Metro Manila and site of the main hub for projects under the multinational Pax Silica initiative.

Two other potential sites for water detention basins—one spanning 98 ha and the other 207 ha—have been offered by groups of landowners led by local legislative council secretary George Cariño. The proposal balances the need to make NLEx flood-free and provides flood protection to surrounding communities, Cariño said in a Sept. 10 letter to Dizon.

The NLEX Corp. regards the Tulaoc River crucial to its flood control work. Its executives and acting San Simon Mayor Anne Canlas inspected the dredging on Sept. 18.

The local government admitted, though, that it “does not yet have a finalized comprehensive flood control plan.”

Excluded

A public planner familiar with the process said flood management programs are not known to be made at the municipal level because these are designed to be regional in scope or across provinces and towns. While the concurrence of the Regional Development Council is sought, local governments are shut out of the implementation by the DPWH and National Irrigation Administration (NIA).

Dizon confirmed the exclusion: “We have long been receiving complaints from local government units (LGUs) that they barely hear from the DPWH or the agency’s officials have not been talking to them.”

“Well, it’s different now. Just like what the President said when he first appointed us to the DPWH, our efforts should be coordinated. We need to hear the immediate needs of LGUs. We will address those concerns,” he said.

The centralized state of things continues to happen in the DPWH and NIA even decades after the passage of the Local Government Code of 1991 and the decentralization it ushered. The agencies claimed having technical expertise, but flood control or irrigation projects turned out to be a mine of corruption whose orchestration is traced to some lawmakers.

Asked about this, local officials only said that there are “ongoing meetings and coordination [that] are being conducted among NLEx, MMDA (Metropolitan Manila Development Authority), the DPWH and San Simon to discuss and explore possible improvements and the development of appropriate flood control and mitigation measures for the municipality.”

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It is not enough to dredge the Tulaoc River, said Parungao, drawing on her familiarity with her hometown’s changing physical landscape. /cb