Singing the Blues under the Rain

After a two-month dry spell, the rains brought by two storms finally fell. The storms came shortly after Manila Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales encouraged his parish priests to lead their parishioners in praying for rain. The rest of us, particularly our Ilocano and Cagayan Valley brothers and sisters, have also been praying for rain for their parched farmlands.

As a result of typhoons Chedeng and Dodong, some lowland regions were flooded, forcing villagers to evacuate. But parts of northern Luzon, particularly Ilocandia and Cagayan Valley, reports say, need more rain so rice farmers can finally plow their fields and plant their seedlings. Other reports say water levels in our dams and reservoirs are still below minimum capacity.

This is the challenge: How can we distribute rain? How can we ensure that the torrents brought by typhoons fall on the parched rice fields of Ilocandia and Cagayan Valley rather than on flood-prone Manila and its adjoining towns? This can be a challenge for our science and technology department and science schools. And this certainly requires no emergency power, which Malacañang (the presidential palace) has claimed it needed to address the ensuing crisis brought about by the dry spell. The best that the presidential palace may yet have to do is to exercise its political will in helping mobilize the necessary human resources and funds to support initiatives addressing our water needs.

Other countries like India have proactive measures in addressing their water crisis. They, for example, have developed technologies that can harvest rain and water from fog. So during the dry months they have water to use at home and in their farms.

The idea of harvesting rain is putting to good use what Nature freely provides. My German neighbor, a retired NATO personnel married to a Filipina, can teach us a lesson or two in maximizing one of Nature’s important gifts. He has built at his yard an underground water reservoir designed to collect water from his house’s roof. Through an electric pump, the collected water is pumped into the kitchen and bathrooms. The collected rain water supplements an electric generator-run deep well water system.

Like other cities, Baguio is actually wasting plenty of rain water. Nature has so designed our land in such a way that when it rains these free universal solvent should be caught in our catch-basins or valleys and plateaus. Through our catch-basins rain water percolates underground, finding its way through our aquifers and into our springs. (An aquifer is an underground bed or layer of earth, gravel, or porous stone that yields water.)

But with so much cement covering wide swaths of our lands in Baguio not all rain water percolates underground to supply our aquifers. This is simply because almost every square inch of Baguio is cement. Every square meter of cement-covered land deprives every cubic meter of rain water from percolating into the ground. Since rain water no longer percolates into our grounds, what we have during the rainy season is water runoff that floods our drainage, creeks and City Camp Lagoon. This runoff ends up causing soil erosion and landslides, resulting in damage to human lives and property.

One challenge for the city government is to protect whatever has remained of its vital catch-basins. Maybe the city government, with the help of the environment and natural resources department and barangay (village) officials, can start identifying whatever remaining watersheds or catch-basins at the barangay level. And the barangay governments that can really protect and sustain (through proper reforestation and barring squatting) identified catch-basins and watersheds can be given some kind of incentives.

Water, not oil, is seen as the bone of conflict in the future. So it’s time to start looking for ways to put to maximum use the rains that come to us in abundance during the typhoon season. Otherwise, we’ll just end up singing the blues under the rain.