Rain floods - we don’t have that in Puerto Princesa.

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I was watching the news for the past couple of days and I see people wading through flood waters in the capital city up to chest deep.  There are thousands of people fleeing their homes because of the heavy flood.  Seven people died already.

Most of the local headlines are about the devastating typhoon in various parts of the country, mostly those provinces in the northern part like Bulacan and Pampanga, some parts of the south i.e. Laguna and most parts of Metro Manila are under flood waters.  This caused suspension of school classes, businesses, and most offices.  The heavy rain caused by the typhoon is devastating, nature has taken its revenge once again.  Why is that?

Here in Palawan where I am presently residing – fortunately – we don’t experience such catastrophe.  It was raining when I arrived last month, in fact, almost everyday since then for almost the whole month.  There are couple of ones that were really heavy that I thought it’s going to flood, but no, it didn’t happen, all it took was a couple of hours and the water that accumulated in front of our house evaporated.  I noticed that there are some drainage system but only in the city center, for most residential areas out of the center, there’s none.  Yet, flood is unheard of in this part of the country.  Puerto Princesa city is dubbed as a “city in a forest”, and there’s a reason for that, it’s surrounded by green mountains and plains, trees are everywhere, lush forest in fact.

Fewer trees results in flood.  It’s a common knowledge that trees absorbs water from the soil through their roots, whenever it’s raining, the natural drainage system (trees that is) work.  More trees in the surroundings, the better job of absorbing the rain water.  Consequently, less trees means more flood during heavy rains.  That’s how nature work, destroy them and they will get back at you.  So, fortunate are the people living in Puerto Princesa city or Palawan in general, they love their surroundings, they love nature here, so there’s no reason for it to be vindictive about.   What’s amazing is, nature really is working here instinctively, throw some seeds on the ground without even cultivating it yet it grows.  In fact, we have some tall fruit-bearing trees on our backyard like mango and santol (wild mangosteen) and since the fruits are really on high branches, we don’t bother picking it, it just falls on the roof landing on ground and in due time small leaves starts to sprout on its seeds - naturally - without even planting it.  Nice, right?

So even if we cut few trees to prevent its roots from getting under our houses and destruct it in due time, it’s fine because they know how to multiply organically.

So here in Puerto Princesa, we just sit back, relax and enjoy the sounds of the rain trickling on our roofs.