Nurturing nature (2)

On Sept. 6, 1995, Lake Maughan, sitting atop the dormant Mount Parker in T’boli town, South Cotabato, overflowed. An estimated 30 million cubic meters of water quickly flowed downstream, reaching not only the low-lying municipalities of South Cotabato, Sultan Kudarat, and Maguindanao provinces but also many barangays in Cotabato City, where the floodwaters ended their journey.

One of these barangays, Rosary Heights, was where we used to live then. That day, one of our nephews had to carry my son on his back so he can go to school. Floodwaters reached our house making it impossible for my son, who was less than three feet tall, to wade through.

The reason for the overflowing of the lake? Mount Parker had been mined, both for landfill, gravel, and other prospecting (for gold and other minerals) purposes, not to mention that it has long been deforested. Consequently, the soil became loose so the whole mountain finally “collapsed” on Lake Maughan. It was like a basin that was already filled to the brim with water, yet soil from the collapsed mountain was added to it, causing an immediate overflowing of the lake’s waters.

At least 53 people, including women and children, died in that incident, and 14 were reported missing by local and regional media in the aftermath. The local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office of South Cotabato later on assessed the total damage at P278 million, including infrastructure and crops that were destroyed along the floodwaters’ path.

Local media also reported that a local official was indicted for allegedly causing the undue exploitation of Mount Parker, and this eventually also cost him the end of his political career in South Cotabato province. He lost in the local elections the year after the tragic incident.

At first, I wondered why our small village, located more than 100 kilometers away from Lake Maughan was reached by water almost immediately after it overflowed. My lessons in human ecology suddenly jogged my memory about the four informal laws of ecology according to biologist/environmentalist Dr. Barry Commoner in his 1971 book, “The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology.” The first law states that “Everything is connected to everything else.” This alone taught me that what happens in the upstream parts of our region will have immediate and long-lasting consequences for the villages downstream. The second one states: “Everything must go somewhere.” With water, this is quite apparent. Even before civilization reached the level that we are seeing now, water has always shown that it “will seek its own level,” a metaphor that demonstrates the fact that water in containers must be of the same level; if not, then overflowing occurs. When physical infrastructure constricts the movement of water, or when no structures are allowing for its natural flow, flooding is expected. This is the case of many of our highways, where roads are built first before constructing the drainage assembly that controls the flow of water in times of heavy rainfall. The installation of culvert pipes beside highways was and still is an afterthought: it follows several years after the roads are constructed, when flooding has become an almost daily occurrence, especially in low-lying localities.

The Mount Parker–Lake Maughan tragic incident that happened almost 28 years ago is now long forgotten. But for me, it was a wake-up call of how our actions as the most superior beings on earth have altered natural environments and habitats, causing a tragedy. It was not a “natural” disaster, as many environmental tragic episodes have been dubbed. It was not nature that caused it, but it was human or anthropogenic interventions causing the collapse of a mountain, resulting in the overflow of water.

Remember the catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear explosion that happened in April 1986? It was also caused by human error, and bad planning, according to a documentary by David Attenborough.

(To be concluded)

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