24/08/2025
The Floods Keep Rising, But Who Keeps the Plans?
Every time rivers spill into our streets, the blame game begins. Contractors face scrutiny, engineers are grilled, and politicians point fingers. But one crucial agency remains curiously absent in most public debates: the River Basin Control Office (RBCO) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
Created by executive orders in the mid-2000s, RBCO was meant to be the country’s integrated flood planner. Its job is not to pour concrete or dredge rivers. Its role is bigger — to look at entire basins as one living system, making sure d**es, dams, reforestation, and land use form a coherent strategy. In short: to prevent the very siloed projects that have now failed us.
And yet, as billions in flood-control contracts rolled out in recent years, top officials admitted there was no substantial coordination with RBCO. That revelation should alarm us more than contractor cartels or overpriced riprap. It means the state itself knowingly sidelined its own basin-level compass.
Worse, many of RBCO’s master plans are outdated or half-finished. The Mindanao River Basin plan was last revised over a decade ago. The Apayao–Abulug plan was only endorsed recently, not yet fully implemented. For the rest, we are left guessing. Without fresh, climate-responsive maps, even the best-built floodwalls are anchored to the past.
The scandal, then, is not just about ghost projects or corrupt bidding. It is also about ghost planning — where the office designed to guide us has been reduced to a footnote in DENR’s budget, its funds buried in broad program lines, invisible to public scrutiny.
This is why accountability must be redefined. It’s not enough to catch the contractor who cut corners. We must demand to know:
• Why were projects greenlit without basin-level sign-off?
• Why are master plans not updated and published regularly?
• Why does RBCO, legally the “lead agency,” appear powerless to compel compliance?
Congress now eyes a Department of Water Resources, which may swallow RBCO whole. But unless lawmakers give the new body real authority and transparent budgets, we will simply replace one acronym with another — and the floods will continue to rise.
For once, let us insist that planning matters as much as pouring concrete. Otherwise, the next time the waters come, our government will again be caught drowning in its own contradictions.
