By Ben Contreras A LITTLE past 9 am, Osmeña’s traffic has become a bit heavy due to several double parkings.  It’s good that the car driver coming from the opposite direction was kind enough to give way for me to turn left toward my office. Most of the drivers were cooperative except for the one with an expensive black car. I asked the passenger to call his driver to move the car. Minutes passed and the car was still there. I told the passenger that I am giving him three minutes to move or I will call an RTA officer to issue them a ticket. I called up Engr. Ric Valerio. Valerio came after five minutes and the car won’t budge. Valerio has to wait again for more minutes before the driver came back. I don’t know what happened next. I was busy with Kapitan Apa directing traffic. The situation caused a motorcycle, whose driver couldn’t wait, to hit a taxi and slightly damaged the rear bumper. They were able to reach an agreement. Hence, there was no need to call the RTA for assistance. After an hour or more, everything was fine. On my way back to my office, I saw a little black car (KGF-434) being signaled by our guard to move because it was blocking our entrance. The driver who turned out to be a lady refused to move. When I talked to her and told her that she was blocking our entrance, she said, “that’s private” or something to that effect. I don’t know what she meant exactly. Maybe, she would also allow other cars to park in front of her gate at home. And to think that right in front was a space more than enough for her car. She moved forward all right although “gaalburoto.” What a woman!

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Thanks to Imee Austria who gave me a copy of that voluminous “Master Plan Feasibility Study of Flood Control and Drainage Projects in Selected River Basins Nationwide.” Frankly, I have no patience reading through hundreds of pages that are highly technical and hard to understand especially so when one is not an engineer. Basically, the project is a master plan and study that proposes “a 25-year return period flood control to protect 20 barangays with an estimated inundation area of 578 hectares and to relieve a population of approximately 32,000 from flood problems.” The most important works of this project would be 1) Widening and dredging of the channel to increase flow capacity and 2) Improvement and construction of dikes and retaining walls. There are also what they called “non-structural measures like, 1) Community-based flood warning system (CBFEWS) to facilitate evacuation of people living in flood prone areas, 2) Flood plain management (land use control) to minimize flood damage potential in high-flood risk area, and 3) Watershed management to minimize the increase of runoff due to conversion of the existing forest. Since this FS was made prior to Sendong, I won’t go to the other details because a lot have changed after Sendong. Suffice it to say that there are indeed moves to mitigate the impact of future calamities. We are seeing work being done near the Ysalina Bridge. Are they part of this project already? DPWH should issue statements in this regard if only to give people a sense of awareness. I hope to see a perspective of the whole project, like how the retaining walls and dikes would look like. Cagayan River, if fully dredged and with retaining walls and dikes, could become a tourist attraction. It is an ambitious project but worth it!

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Mayor Oscar Moreno has a weekly TV program that lasts for two hours. As already suggested to Maricel Casiño Rivera, I hope to see intermissions that would educate people about traffic rules and regulations. Ms. Rivera’s response was positive. I also informed OHD chairman Egay Uy about it. I will wait for it to become a reality, say, in one month perhaps, Ms. Rivera?