Mandaue’s flooded roads

Atty. Jerome G. Neri
The Scrutineer

SO the rainy season is in full swing and Cebu was underwater last week. I am very disappointed at everybody responsible for the rehabilitation of A.S. Fortuna Street. After many millions spent and a very long time wasted in rehabilitating this road, the problem is exactly the same or even worse. It definitely did not become better.

Over a year ago, I wrote about this A.S. Fortuna rehabilitation. I said that it seemed to me no common sense was used in its rehabilitation. For almost two years, A.S. Fortuna was hell. The road was rebuilt in the most inconvenient way for the public. Random sections were destroyed and repaired in a manner where it was obvious there was no proper game plan.

It was stupidity at its best. I will not go back into the details of such stupidity but what is about three kilometers of road repair was completed in a world record slow pace of almost two years.

Giant culverts were lined up on the side of the road along A.S. Fortuna and Hernan Cortes Streets. This showed the stupid plan. Bigger culverts were installed so as to drain more water out of A.S. Fortuna and therefore get rid of the flooding. So these big culverts end up in the Subangdaku River where the water from A.S. Fortuna would be dumped. Apparently, the contractor and everybody involved in the project never learned from their high school physics. They completely forgot that it is physically impossible to drain water to an overflowing river and because the force of water in the overflowing river is greater than the force of water coming from the drains of A.S. Fortuna, the exact opposite happens, the river will now drain to the road.

Naturally, last week when the heavy rains were pouring down, the portion of A.S. Fortuna where Rolling Hills is went underwater very quick. It was not because the culverts underneath were too small or were clogged, A.S. Fortuna got flooded because the culverts worked! Water was gushing out of the drainage system really fast, such that the drainage was like a small fountain. It was the water from the mountains traveling through the Subangdaku River that was draining to A.S. Fortuna. The multi-million repair is a complete failure, in my opinion.

So I ranted about this problem on social media and got some very interesting comments. Some put the blame on Rolling Hills, saying that structure effectively closed the drainage in that area. While that may be true for past floods, the rehabilitation of A.S. Fortuna was done with Rolling Hills already in existence for more than 10 years. If Rolling Hills has blocked vital water drainage, the rehabilitation plan should have taken that into consideration and confronted that problem. It is obvious that they did not.

The pattern of stupidity in Mandaue City continues. For almost a year now they have been repairing V. Albano St. (this is where Channel 9 is). It is far from complete. It causes inconvenience to the motorists who pass through there. It is the same as A.S. Fortuna – they are repairing the roads and the drainage. The stupidity here is that while V. Albano is not even near completion, they started work on the intersecting L. Jaime St. The result of this stupidity will be more traffic. Why can they not finish and complete V. Albano first and then work on L. Jaime thereafter? Why do they want to make life difficult?

Now in fairness to the new mayor of Mandaue, he took swift action and had the Subangdaku River cleaned of everything and anything that is obstructing its exit to the sea. I am calling on him to please review what is going on in his City on the road repairs and rehabilitation. Most of these are National Government projects under the DPWH from the previous administration. We need some common sense.