Emergency planners in Manila now have a tool that can point to which neighborhoods will go underwater roughly two hours before the water arrives, a capability Mayor Francisco “Isko Moreno” Domagoso presented Wednesday at the Kapihan sa Manila Prince forum.
The forecasting runs on a mix of artificial intelligence and ArcGIS-based 3D mapping that reads rainfall figures against ground elevation and the layout of the city’s drainage network. According to the mayor, once those variables are matched against a fully mapped drainage system, the software can single out at-risk zones quickly.
“We can predict whether flooding will occur by calculating the amount of rainfall, the volume of water in relation to our land elevation,” Domagoso said. “Once we have mapped all the drainage systems, we can easily detect within a few minutes which areas will experience flooding two hours afterward.”
Feeding that analysis is an AI-equipped drone that photographs and maps structures across the capital down to millimeter accuracy, a level of detail the mayor described as far beyond what an ordinary drone can capture. That aerial data becomes the backbone of a geographic picture used well beyond storm response.
The Manila City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Department operates the ArcGIS platform, using it to keep tabs on physical assets and regulatory conditions alike, from the placement and state of electric posts to zoning compliance across the city’s six districts. The setup arrives weeks after Manila was named the only Philippine recipient of Esri’s Special Achievement in GIS Award, one of 197 organizations recognized worldwide for their geospatial work.
Domagoso framed the spending on data collection and storage as groundwork meant to outlast his term, leaving future administrators a system that pulls together real property records, business information, and public health data down to the barangay level.
The health component, he explained, would let officials trace clusters of illness such as tuberculosis or respiratory cases to specific communities, opening the door to targeted programs and sharper resource decisions. Earlier warning of rising water, the mayor argued, translates directly into time for residents to move themselves and their belongings out of harm’s way.
