Finger on the dike
Some of you may have heard about a brave Dutch boy who saved Haarlem, a Dutch municipality near Amsterdam, from floods.
Large parts of the Netherlands are below sea level, and the Dutch, over the centuries, have built an impressive and effective flood management system, which includes dikes to hold back water from flooding into towns during storms.
In 1865, Mary Mapes Dodge published a children’s book titled “The Silver Skates,” describing a young Dutch boy named Hans Brinker who happened to pass by a dike and saw that it was leaking. He then used his finger to plug the hole and held the fort, literally, on an entire cold night until villagers found him the next day and relieved him.
Turns out this courageous boy never existed, but the Dutch seem to tolerate the story, even constructing a small statue in Haarlem honoring perhaps not so much the boy, but the values of valor and fortitude.
(A quick aside here. Don’t confuse Hans Brinker with Manneken Pis, another little boy who saved a Belgian town from enemy attackers by peeing on their gunpowder. A statue was built in Brussels, Belgium, to honor him and is a major tourist attraction.)
Back to Hans Brinker. I remembered his story the other night amid incessant rain. I thought of the flood of news articles that started with a furious President Marcos ordering fraud audit into several billion pesos’ worth of defective flood control projects (yes, including many dikes). In one story, the President even did a Hans Brinker when, checking one dike, he used his hand to show defects in a dike in the crumbling construction material.
So many investigative journalism stories have been appearing about the evil contractors (and even their children) shamelessly flaunting their ill-gotten wealth—from designer clothing to fleets of luxury cars, and of course, palatial mansions.
So many calls for justice, but the feeling I have right now is that we are a nation of Hans Brinkers: so many fingers in so many dikes, and I wonder if our beleaguered nation will ever find justice. If there is anger, it’s because the amounts involved are so large, and the exposés came in part as we were, and are still, being hit by flash floods all over the country.
No doubt, we need to address the fraud, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed, hoping all this will not end up with whitewashing. Moreover, I hope it won’t mean allocating more funds to useless projects, including awarding the money to new (and, I am certain, old) crooks.
There is no lack of good models for flood management engineering, the Dutch being the leaders here, given that most of the country is below sea level. But all over the world, you have other good projects as well. I even read about a Chinese project where they monitor the vegetation on dikes to determine the integrity of the dikes—profuse vegetation suggests water is seeping through!
Let’s learn from the experts globally. At the same time, we also need to relearn old lessons, especially the way these floods are symptomatic of the climate emergency. An Inquirer headline yesterday says it all: Deluge in Quezon City: 7 days of rainfall in an hour. That was more than the rainfall in the disastrous “Ondoy” when Marikina residents got the equivalent of a month’s rainfall in 12 hours. Ondoy killed 464 people.
Grim statistics aside, we forget that global warming means the atmosphere’s heat creates more moisture, which brings torrential rains.
We’ve also been warned by climate-conscious architects about all the heat islands created by the unregulated construction of high-rise buildings. Just one example: Residents of the Greenhills area, particularly near Ortigas Avenue, are protesting the plans for a 70-story building.
Many of these high-rises are built for speculative investments, artificially driving up real estate prices. They are also heat islands, attracting more heat from the sun, which increases the intensity and frequency of rain. Moreover, the high-rises are huge footprints that block rainwater from being drained, worsened by substandard flood control projects. Rainwater rises quickly, putting pedestrians and motorists in great danger.
The rains also mean increases in infectious diseases like dengue, typhoid fever, cholera, and leptospirosis, where bacteria are spread by rats’ urine in the floodwaters. With the number of leptospirosis infections—including 50 deaths in the last two months—have you wondered about the intensity of rat infestations we have? My doctor friends at one government hospital call these four-legged giants ”Roborats.”
The horrors of flooding will need more than heroic fingers on the dikes.
