ILOILO City – With flooding now a recurring nightmare for communities across Western Visayas, disaster officials are moving to convene a region-wide summit that would hammer out a single, integrated flood master plan — a long-overdue strategy to replace piecemeal and costly fixes.
Civil defense and regional disaster council chair Raul Fernandez admitted that while local government units (LGUs) have been proposing floodwalls and seawalls, the visits of his team revealed a sobering reality: many of these projects are capital-intensive, sometimes ineffective, and unlikely to last.
“What we learn is we can adopt an integrated solution, not just an engineering intervention. We can integrate nature-based solutions and technology. We are eyeing a ridge-to-reef solution,” Fernandez stressed.
He said protecting highland areas is crucial to avert landslides and flooding downstream, while coastal defenses must not hinge solely on concrete seawalls but also on natural shields such as mangroves.
A planning session is set to chart the path for the summit.
“We are going to sit down and initially plan for it, if our timeline can accommodate it until the end of the year. This is the time to hype up because of what is happening now,” Fernandez declared.
The proposal also resonated during the recent Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council’s third quarter full council meeting, where Iloilo Provincial DRRM officer Cornelio Salinas warned against fragmented flood projects.
Salinas said the summit could finally bring all efforts together into a single framework.
He pointed to the flood control works threading Iloilo City’s Jaro and La Paz districts, and Pavia town, stressing the need to see if main floodways must also be established in downstream LGUs.
In a separate interview, Salinas minced no words: flood interventions are not optional but imperative.
“It is not just whimsical,” he said, adding that Gov. Arthur Defensor Jr. is backing the summit to determine whether major flood control projects are equally necessary in central and northern Iloilo./PN
