Metropolitan Manila Development Authority General Manager Nicolas Torre III said his family home in Davao City was among the properties inundated during the weekend flooding, using the incident to press public officials on whether the country’s flood control spending is delivering results.
In a Facebook post accompanied by photos of floodwater inside a house, Torre said the property is located in NHA Bangkal, Barangay Talomo — one of the city’s perennial flood zones along the Talomo River. He said the title to the home is registered under his and his wife’s names and asserted his standing to speak on the issue as a Davao City resident.
Torre said it was not the first time the house had flooded, adding that he had refrained from posting about it previously because he did not want the matter to be colored by politics. He said many families in Davao City experience the same repeated flooding year after year.
Addressing the common explanation that flooding is normal in Davao because of mountain runoff and the city’s role as a catch basin, Torre said that reasoning may hold some truth but does not resolve the problem. The mountains are not new and heavy rain is not new, he said, arguing that a known problem should come with a known solution.
He said billions of pesos are spent on flood control precisely because authorities are aware of the mountain runoff, the heavy rains, and the areas prone to flooding. Flood control, he said, is not meant to stop the rain but to keep floodwater from entering people’s homes. His question, he said, was simple: if flooding continues to reach inside houses, is the system actually working.
Torre said that as a resident he was not looking for excuses but for results. The measure of flood control, he said, is not the number of projects but the number of families no longer reaching by floodwater.
The weekend flooding in Davao City, triggered by the southwest monsoon and Severe Tropical Storm Kiyapo, submerged communities in Los Amigos, Matina, Bangkal and Talomo Proper, prompting evacuations and rescues as the Talomo River overflowed. NHA Bangkal sits beside the Talomo River and has ranked among the city’s most flood-prone areas across multiple disasters over the past decade.
