Manila is Flooded!

Taken from Philstar - Below, children play on a flooded portion of Roxas Boulevard in Pasay City yesterday after storm ‘Isang’ dumped heavy rains overnight and flooded many parts of Metro Manila. By Manny Marcelo

I saw a picture of a woman sitting on what looked like a piece of plywood as it rode the flooded streets of Manila. Then in another one, children swimming along the flooded Roxas Boulevard.

Typhoon "Isang" dumped enough rain to get Manilenos swimming in their own backyards.

The name Isang only means one thing: this typhoon is the ninth to hit the Philippines. And there should be more since the typhoon season has just begun.

Flood or getting flooded is nothing new to Metro Manila residents and to the entire Philippine folks.

In our old neighbourhood in Mandaluyong, residents anticipated and prepared for yearly floods. In our own household, we kids used an aunt's concrete fence as our yardstick for when to start piling up our furniture and appliances. You see, my aunt's fence had layered designs so we would watch as the waters cascaded from the Pasig River and covered the layers. If the water reached a certain layer, we would shout to our mother, "time to bring up the stove upstairs or the refrigerator to the stairs landing."

Every folk in our Mandaluyong neighbourhood knew when to start buying an extra loaf of bread or an extra can of sardine or pork and beans. We didn't just rely on Paeng Yabut or Johnny "Lundagin Mo Baby" de Leon to tell us when signal number 2 or 3 would hit; we instead, looked at the level of water by the Pasig River. Our own house was a block away from the mighty River and my aunt's house in Sta. Ana backed to the river itself.

Almost every year, water would enter our street, then the houses. Only those houses built on very high ground were able to escape the wrath of the floods. Hagdang Bato is a high ground. It is where another aunt lived and where my father used to bring his car when our street was already flooding. Or car owners would jockey up for a spot along Lambingan Bridge (Sta Ana/Mandaluyong boundary), another high ground.

Bakeries and neighbourhood sari sari stores made good sales during a flood; the Mandaluyong Market would be flooded, too, so shops were closed. People bought everything, candles, batteries, canned goods, bread, Dari Creme, tinapa and tuyo from the sari sari store.

When the first floor of our house got flooded, we lived upstairs. The refrigerator was transferred to the stairs landing, and when the flood got really high, we would use high cabinets to mount our furniture. Luckily, there were only few flooding when the entire kitchen faucet was covered, so we still had drinking water most of the time.

But in some areas of Mandaluyong, it got so worse that residents had to be ferried out in bancas. We would sit by the window and watch as bancas plied people from the area we called "squatters' area."

But flood could be fun for kids. If the level of the water was still low, kids would be out swimming (this was the time when Pasig River was still clean). My mother never allowed us to swim in the flood water but "magtampisaw" or just wade through it. So we watched other kids or else, we passed time watching grown ups flirt with each other while wading in the water.

Although we were limited in our movement and activities, we still enjoyed dinners during a flood. Portola sardines tasted better when there was a flood, so did Libby's Pork and Beans, and tinapa with fresh tomatoes and itlog na pula.

In the late 70's, flooding somewhat abated in our area. Then our family moved to Quezon City, a high area, and we never experienced flood again.

Manila, we feel your pain, but then some people love the rain and storm.