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When she wakes up in the morning, 47-year-old Luz Auditor first looks at her calendar.
The daily tide readings there are important. If it says the high tide will reach 1.9 meters or higher, that’s a cue to move slippers, TV sets and other house items to the top of tables and tall cabinets.
This is sitio Paradise Island, Mandaue City, where 500 families live in shanties on stilts, keeping a watchful eye on the tide.
But the slum, which is visible from the Mandaue-Mactan Bridge, has been experiencing an unusual rise in water levels since Wednesday.
Residents said the seawater would sometimes overflow toward the private road, but this year, it’s knee deep and entering houses.
Residents and local schoolteachers now talk about the strange effect of “global warming”.
When visited the sitio at noon, the whole village was under water. Residents went calmly about their way, placing refrigerators, karaoke machines and television sets on top of tables.
Children frolicked in the pool of seawater as it flowed inland carrying empty bottles, plastics, and other garbage.
Auditor, who lives with her two married children, walked in knee-deep water with blue jeans rolled up.
“Kada-adlaw gyud among tanawn pero karon murag taas-taas gyud ang tubig,” she said. (We check the tide level every day but the water is higher than usual now.)
The tide schedule of a calendar held by a residents shows a 2.1 meters on Thursday and Friday.
Teachers from the nearby Cesar Cabahug Elementary School are also puzzled by the sea change.
Science teacher and guidance counsellor Nestor Deguit said that in 12 years, this was the first time he saw such a “high” rise in the tide.
He used as a reference point the school building built by Petron in 2002 to stand at an elevation one foot higher than others to avoid flooding.
Yesterday, the Petron school building was among those under water.
“It’s only now that I’ve seen the water level this high in 12 years when the school used to be called Looc Elementary School,” he said.
Co-teachers were busy drying pages of soaked books. While the interview was going on, the teachers grimaced as they watched the tide begin to rise again.
School prinicipal Rita Cabahug said this was the first time her office was under water. She had to ask someone to lift the school's sound system to the top of the conference table.
If the seawater continues to enter the school when classes open next week, Cabahug said her teachers have standing orders to automatically suspend classes to prevent drowning and other accidents.
“We will just hold make-up classes or extended hours of classes so that we can meet the required number of school days for a year,” said the principal.
There’s little the Mandaue City government can do for now except monitor the sea level because “it’s a natural occurrence,” said Mandaue City Administrator Briccio Joseph Boholst.
is house beside the elementary school doesn’t usually get wet with seawater. Yesterday, his garage was soaked.
“That was a first time. Nahibulong bitaw pud ko,” he said.
Boholst was designated acting mayor of Mandaue City in the absence of Mayor Jonas Cortes, who flew to the Netherlands to study, among others, how to address flooding.
“We will ask a report from the barangay and we will be ready at the City Hall to assist the residents in case there will be a need for them to evacuate,” said Boholst.
He said this was “not part of the drainage problem in Mandaue because the waters come from the Mactan channel.”
He said the tidal rise underscored the need to hasten the housing project for Looc residents, a controversial medium-rise housing project initiated by the previous administration of Mayor Thadeo Ouano.
With 600 residents in sitio Paradise Island, a six-storey housing project can only accommodate 208 families.
“We are working on another housing project that is still located in barangay Looc but this has to be finalized yet,” Boholst said.
Looc Barangay Captain Cesar “Sol” Cabahug was not available for comment yesterday.
His secretary, Juliet Flores, said there was no need to worry about the because the inflow of the tide was a normal occurrence.
She said barangay officials were not told or received any complaints that the water level was unusually high.
“So far wala man mi buhaton para sa paradise island,” Flores told CDN in a telephone interview.
For more than 40 years, the shanties in sitio Paradise Island have stood over wooden stilts at the foot of the Mactan-Mandaue bridge. The houses are built about five feet above the seawater at low tide of the Mactan Channel.
Neighbors said several children and some drunken men have fallen into the murky water below the houses. They come out smelling of human waste.
