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With last Sunday’s drowning of a five-year-old girl in a creek in Ermita, the accident has refocused attention on the problem of 3,000 or more families living along rivers and waterways of Cebu City.
Living here is dangerous to both the dweller and the eco-system.
In the rainy season, flashfloods destroy property and, in the case of kindergarten pupil Makaela Sol Bedolido, can snuff out life.
In the dry season, the esteros that connect to the sea and winding waterways like the 10-kilometer Guadalupe River , is abused as a giant toilet and waste disposal unit of an uncaring community.
If Mayor Tomas Osmeña had his way, riverside families would all be relocated to a 100-hectare lot owned by the Aznar family
But that plan is still under negotiation.
“Relocating them is not easy. You buy the land, build the structures. You do that on a massive scale. You have to build a church, market, roads and schools,” the mayor told reporters.
Nobody said it would be easy. But the solution, like the problem of Cebu City’s crazy drainage sytem, has been discussed from one rainy season to the next in a frustrating cycle called the Status Quo.
In 2003, the population along the Guadalupe River was counted at 1,000 informal settler families by the Presidential Commission on Urban Poor.
Six years after, that number has tripled.
What hasn’t moved forward, however, is the Cebu City Drainage Master Plan, which identified in 2006 what needs to be done in 50 of the city’s 80 barangays to correct deficiencies in drainage infrastrcuture.
The cost of implementaion, a whopping P1 billion, is not getting funded anytime soon. That doesn’t yet count the cost of relocating urban poor families from hazardous sites.
Osmeña said Cebu City would have to wait for the local government to earn from the sale or use of reclaimed lots in the South Road Properties.
Keeping the creeks and rivers free of pollution and plastic junk is the responsbility of all stakeholders, not just the government.
But only the city government can exercise the political will and police powers to transfer riverdwellers to a site they would willingly stay in.
If not now, then when?
The city of Marikina in Metro Manila was able to do what everyone said was impossible --- clean up a squatter-filled 11-kilometer river starting 1993. Marikina didn’t wait for P1 billion to fall on its lap. The river route now has jogging paths and bike lanes.
A drainage problem of the scale of Cebu City’s does need bold thinking and action more than a fat check from interesting real estate ventures.
Short-term steps like declogging creeks and creating water impounding dams are just that, short-term measures.
Till we get serious action on a long-term solution, city residents will have to rest on Osmeña’s admonition to count their blessings and be thankful somebody else’s home is being flooded, not theirs.
