General Santos City Mayor Darlene Antonino Custodio is taking pains and splitting hairs addressing one of the maladies of a rapidly growing city.

The sight of flooded streets, residences and villages are evoking images previously only seen and captured by television in faraway Metro Manila. Not anymore.

An hour of heavy downpour now guarantees that large portions of at least seven villages in the city will be submerged in deep waters.

Yes, we can blame residents in communities for not taking care and disposing of their solid waste, as well as the drains which are clogging up the city’s very limited drain system.

But it is the first time I heard Custodio say the city is one huge catch basin of rain water with unpredictable spillways. Is it woe to them who live in areas now prone to flooding, then?

Custodio should ask her father Adelbert and, before him, former Mayor Pedro ‘Jun’ Acharon Jr what they did to alleviate the problem when the red flags were raised more than a decade ago.

Or maybe she needs to read Patricio Diaz’s column ‘What a wrath’ in the 9 January, 2013 issue of www.mindanews.com to better understand why we are now suffering from the sins of past commissions and omissions.

And if I may add to Mr. Diaz’s anecdotes, my mother, who arrived here on the same boat that took Manong Pat (as I now call Mindanao’s eminent chronicler of the Moro issue) in 1939 as a six-year-old girl, said Lagao, Ligaya, Katangawan and Conel were once teeming with dau and molave so large they could not be embraced by three people extending their arms around their trunks.

Of course these are now gone.  No use shedding tears for them.  If these trees and forests were still around, we would not be here now.

No Mayor, this city has never seen this flooding before.   Not until recently.

And yes, Mayor.  You were right.  Many of the city’s natural waterways are gone, buried and covered by the concrete jungles of the city.  And you were right, too.  Somehow, city hall allowed many of these waterways to fall into the hands of private owners.

But to say that city is one huge flood catch basin is to cover up for the pathetic and unforgivable lack of foresight and poor hindsight of city officials.

No, I am not entirely putting the blame on you Mayor.  I know what a workaholic you are.

But please spare us from the absurdity of putting the blame on everybody except those who could have done everything to address this one issue of urban blight before and who should be addressing them today.

When the city government started paving our city streets with concrete, it failed to accompany them with a drainage system.  When the functionaries of the city government started to issue development permits for the rising number of subdivisions and resettlement areas, nobody cared to also assess their environmental impact.  Well, they are now.  But belatedly.

For every square foot of paved street, you take away the soil’s capacity to absorb drain and rain water.  Once it cannot seep through the soil, water seeks its own level.  Basic science tells us that.

Mayor, you are right.  The city’s topography is now dictating the flow of our rapidly changing waterways but only because most of them they are either gone now or are already too narrow to accommodate the volume of rain and drain water.

Look at how flood waters are bursting violently from underneath the drain and manholes along J. Catolico Street and the intersection near dxCP.  There used to be a ditch that passed through Socoteco II office and what is now Gaisano Mall and spilled to a creek near the abandoned Caltex depot in Bula.  It is now gone.  No thanks to those who allowed it to be condemned in the name of development.

We understand the magnitude of the problem, Mayor.  But please do not miss the point.