Flooded NLEx: An avertable catastrophe
Even on the last day of the stormy August, a heavy downpour caused a monstrous traffic jam on the North Luzon Expressway (NLEx) that stretched up to 10 kilometers in both directions due to flooding in San Simon, Pampanga. Cars began to get stuck in traffic on Aug. 31 and continued well into Sept. 2, trapping thousands of motorists and commuters on the main artery connecting Central Luzon to the National Capital Region (NCR).
Authorities blamed the traffic gridlock on the sheer volume of water brought by the “habagat” over the weekend, which caused the Pampanga River to overflow and spill into low-lying areas. San Simon town was heavily flooded, including sections of the NLEx near the Tulaoc Bridge. A concrete flood barrier in San Simon’s Barangay San Jose, Fatima, collapsed due to strong currents. Despite the deployment of mobile pumping stations, the floods didn’t subside for days because the water had nowhere to go, leading to backflow.
It’s easy to blame natural phenomena for this, in this case the habagat and the typhoons, including the low-pressure area that have buffeted the Philippines since August.
Root of the problem. But it would take San Miguel Corp. (SMC) president and chief executive officer Ramon Ang to point out the real cause of the recent flooding on NLEx, which had also experienced massive flooding in 2023 (see “Ang: NLEx flooding due to blocked dam water,” 9/2/26). SMC operates other major toll roads such as the South Luzon Expressway, not NLEx.
Ang took it upon himself to explain topography in layman’s terms, providing the impatient public with context for the flooding that has now become a fixture for NCR and Central Luzon residents.
Ang explained to reporters during a Tuesday visit to Bulacan that the floodwaters, released from the rainwater-saturated Pantabangan Dam in Nueva Ecija, cascaded toward Pampanga en route to Manila Bay. The portion of San Simon along NLEx was inundated, but here’s the problem: the water backed up because it had nowhere to go, as soil and debris left behind from the 2024 repair of the NLEx Tulaoc Bridge blocked its path. “The soil had blocked the waterways. They just left it there. They have to remove it to clear the waterways,” said Ang, even as he offered help to stop the flooding.
This revelation could point to sheer negligence on the part of either the NLEx operator, the project contractor, or the government agency that should have been effectively regulating expressways to ensure that the facility the public pays a hefty price to use is always in good, passable condition.
Failure of imagination. Undeniably, it was also a failure of anticipation—let alone of effective preparedness and contingency planning for the torrential habagat rains—which led to this highway catastrophe, forcing motorists to endure anywhere from six to 12 hours stranded in floodwaters, with some reporting even longer delays on the NLEx.
A failure of imagination in risk assessment and disaster risk management occurs when government or private sector planners and engineers are unable to envision a worst-case scenario. Thus, the latest flooding to hit NLEx not only severely inconvenienced the public and disrupted the supply chain—particularly the perishable vegetables from upland provinces—but also cast another blight on the country’s reputation. If we can’t even anticipate scenarios that often occur during the wettest months of the year, then what’s the use of contingency planning that should have been built into the system?
Infrastructure—even massive systems like expressways—can catastrophically fail because of poor design; reliance on historical data that may be outdated in a world beset by climate change; institutional inefficiencies and resorting to shortcuts; lack of redundancy, including secondary barriers in case the primary defense fails; and underestimating secondary effects, such as planning only for localized breakdowns without considering the wider impacts on a national economic artery.
Ultimately, the situation becomes a classic tug-of-war among the elements of profit, people, and planet, in a world whose economies pay lip service to sustainability and climate change adaptation, which requires extensive planning and preparedness rather than the usual cut-and-dried response to calamities.
The perennial flooding in Metro Manila and across river basins in Luzon will forever remind us of the corruption that has marred the country’s flood control and other infrastructure projects over the past 10 years, costing Filipino taxpayers a whopping P1.939 trillion, most of which went down the drain.
But the blame is not solely on the government. We—the electorate who continue to patronize the dynastic political clans from the barangay to the national levels—bear half the blame for finding ourselves in the ditch, suffering under the weight of endless traffic gridlock on pothole-filled roads and garbage-strewn streets, a scene that becomes dystopian during habagat.
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