<div class="image-full-width">
<img loading="lazy" src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources/splillway-panaque.webp" alt="Marcos flood control project" />
<div>
(The last phase of the Marcos plan for flood control, the Parañaque
Spillway, at the bottom right of the map, was never built)
</div>
</div>

A according to a public revelation in 2009, by Felino Palafox, an urban planner who helped to design the flood-control projects and policies in the 1970s for President Marcos, said that these plans, if fully implemented, would have largely prevented the devastation visited on the people of the Philippines by Typhoon Ondoy, which struck Manila on Sept. 26, 2009 - a devastation which continued for months in the form of disease and mass dislocation of the wretched poor of Manila.


The water-management program included four major projects for diverting floodwaters from the Marikina River, which flows from the Sierra Madre Mountains into Manila, joining the Pasig River, and draining into Manila Bay. Floodwaters from the Marikina were to be diverted into Laguna de Bay, a large lake adjacent to Manila, with a spillway to the ocean. 


The first three parts were completed in 1983, 1984, and 1986, the year of the coup against Marcos. The fourth and final part - the spillway from Laguna de Bay to Manila Bay, in case the lake overflowed in a massive flood - was one of the many projects with the name "Marcos" attached to it, that were scrapped by Cory Aquino. When the super-flood caused by Ondoy hit in September 2009, Laguna de Bay overflowed, entirely because the final necessary project, the spillway to the ocean, was never constructed.


A study by Palafox in 1977 warned that allowing squatters or housing construction in the areas prone to flooding would prove disastrous in a major flood. The Metro Manila Commission, chaired by First Lady Imelda Marcos (who had also been elected governor of
Metro Manila), began implementing the Palafox plans, until Cory Aquino took over in 1986.


The picture of Manila even before the floods, is a disgrace. In 2009, fully 20% of the Manila population, or over half a million families, are squatters, living along railroad tracks, sewage canals, and creeks throughout the city. An estimated 400,000 squatters lived on the banks of Laguna de Bay. Not only were their dwellings wiped out, but the wreckage of the dwellings themselves clogged the inadequate drainage channels from the lake.


The flood inundated 80% of Metro Manila and several other provinces. Hundreds were killed in the flood itself, and hundreds more from leptospirosis, a killer disease spread by rat urine in floodwater. The city has virtually no means to pump the water out, and 
six weeks after the flood, large portions of the city were still flooded which last for months.


A second typhoon hit the far northern provinces of the Philippines just days after Ondoy, causing killer mudslides and more flooding. Between the two floods, an estimated 4 million people lost their homes. Approximately 13% of the nation's rice crop was destroyed by the storms and floods. Not only is the Philippines no longer self-sufficient in rice, it is now the world’s largest rice importer. 


Why were the flood-control plans not completed? Like the Bataan Nuclear Plant and the Green Revolution, these projects would have improved the welfare of the Filipino people.




Sources: 
<ol class="article-sources">
<li>
Deadly Manila Floods by Mike Billington, 
Executive Intelligence Review,  November 6, 2009
</li>

</ol>

Flood Control project one of many Marcos projects scrapped by Cory Aquino