Philippines: DRR/CCA Plan Includes Dredging

Macabebe Elementary School welcomed its more than a thousand enrolees Monday despite its unfinished classrooms following construction delays due to intermittent rains last summer which created “fishponds” within its premises.

Principal Marlene Manansala shared that “through the support of the provincial government, 33 dump trucks were provided to cover the fishponds with sands, and this, about half a meter was dealt. But we still need more of this, a hundred trucks will suffice.”

Macabebe Elementary School has a total of seven functional and two non-functional school buildings. With the floodings over the past years, 20 classrooms are needed to be elevated.

“We have enough teachers but what we demand is these situations needed to be addressed for this is for our school children,” Manansala added.

This problem shall soon be addressed after the school was selected as among the 47-flood affected schools in the province of Pampanga that is bound to benefit from the P4.6 billion “Integrated Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) Measures in Low-Lying Areas of Pampanga Bay.”

DRR/CCA has two major components – first is the dredging of more than 32-kilometer rivers of the province to prevent them from overflowing during rainy seasons while the second part is the elevation of flood prone areas and the transfer of schools to safer grounds to protect the structures from ravages of floodwaters.

It aims to reduce the flood level from 1.42 to 2.99 meters and the number of flood-affected areas from 40,150 hectares to 23,780 hectares in the low-lying areas of Pampanga Bay.

[mappress]

Press Release, June 10, 2013