WHY METRO MANILA IS ALWAYS FLOODED

Solutions were ready 50 years ago but never implemented, leaving the Philippine capital drowning in preventable chaos

- BY JAY HILOTIN | Senior Assistant Editor

Why is Metro Manila, composed of 16 cities and one municipality, always flooded? An urban planner has offered some hard truths — and real solutions.

For veteran architect-urban planner Felino “Jun” Palafox, the question isn’t why Metro Manila floods. It’s why we still pretend we don’t know the answer. “We saw this coming 50 years ago,” he says.

Palafox, who holds a Master’s Degree in environmental planning and completed advanced management in Harvard, is a legend in Philippine urban planning (and one of Forbes Asia’s “48 Heroes of Philanthropy”). He has been waving the flood flag in the capital since the 1970s. Back then, as a young planner working on the World Bank-funded “Metroplan Manila”, he and his team warned of exactly the chaos we now see on rainy days: flooded streets, traffic nightmares, garbage-clogged waterways.

“At 25, we predicted this. I’m now 75,” he quips. “We said, if we do nothing, there’ll be catastrophic flooding, congestion, and all the urban mess.”

Too much water, nowhere to go

He called Laguna Lake (often referred to as “Laguna de Bay”) as a “toilet without a flush” to illustrate how water — especially floodwaters — gets dumped into the lake without any effective way to drain it out.