By the sandbags, they pray
The people in the village where I grew up felt lucky: the dike built a few years ago along its section of the Pasig River apparently served its purpose and largely spared the area from the floods that still covered several other riverside settlements three weeks after ‘’Ondoy’’ struck. The water did rise in the village during the storm, but much of it was drained away in a less than week by the pumping stations that came with the construction of the dike.
And so the people thought they were lucky – until they took a closer look a few days ago and saw cracks in the dike in at least three different places. Last time I asked, over two hundred sandbags have since been rushed to the breaking portions of the dike, keeping the wall from total collapse and the leaks somewhat manageable.
Entire neighborhoods are now on edge, knowing what a full breach would mean: a flashflood probably more ferocious than the deluge that sank many parts of Metro Manila when ‘’Ondoy’’ was still around. And if disaster strikes this way — the flood being triggered not by a new storm but by a grave flaw in the infrastructure — the irony would be cruel: water from the swollen Pasig rushing into homes under clear skies.
At the peak of Ondoy’s fury, the river’s waterline rose so high that, if viewed from the street, fishing boats and ferries you wouldn’t normally see before are suddenly visible above the dike. The tide had lifted the boats up, and it’s as if they were now floating above you. You may be totally dry where you stand, but beyond the wall a few steps away is a mass of water that could probably sweep across an entire town in minutes, a force just waiting for a weak spot to ram through.
That’s how much peril the sandbags – and maybe the prayers of those who keep watch — have so far held back.
