With the rains falling almost daily, our soil could be so heavily saturated by now that any heavy rainfall would find water rushing directly to the sea.
This possibility of a repeat of the Feb. 7 flood of 2009 keeps hounding all of us who had been through that experience.
It’s refreshing to know that our government is doing some measures to prevent a major flood from ever taking place again. The City has been de-clogging canals without letup and in addition, trees have been pruned to prevent branches from falling on motorists or pedestrians. There may be other steps that are being done which we do not know of.
But we also cannot help but voice concern over some things that we see. There are people living on top of the Tubod creek, as well as along the riverbanks, or on dry river beds.
By doing so, these people endanger themselves when the floods do come.
And when it does come, the government will have to deal with an urgent problem of rescuing them, and providing them with resettlement areas.
The best part, however, is that all these potential problems caused by informal settlers could be avoided by prohibiting them from living there in the first place.
The cities of Cebu and Mandaue, which had long tolerated the presence of informal settlers in its waterways, learned this lesson the hard way last week when they were forced to declare a state of calamity after a two-hour rainfall flooded many of their barangays. Now, they are embarking on a program to return those settlers to their places of origin.
We don’t have to wait for that time to happen to Dumaguete City. We can prevent that from happening today. All it takes is to do what is necessary and right — and fast.