DISASTERS from the past week expose the same issue: corruption in the government. In Calumpit, Bulacan — a town with dozens of flood-control projects worth over P2 billion — an entire village went underwater, and the local government was forced to declare a state of calamity, with more than 150,000 residents affected. Days earlier, Public Works Secretary Vince Dizon stood on a stretch of EDSA that had just been repaved as part of the government’s P6-billion rehabilitation project, only to find it already cratered with potholes after a few days of rain. His reaction, caught on video and widely reported, was unfiltered fury. Two infrastructure failures, two supposedly “completed” projects, and two reminders that when disaster strikes, it doesn’t just flood streets or crack pavement — it exposes exactly where public money went, and where it didn’t.
Natural disasters do not always create corruption in government, they in fact reveal it. A typhoon or a monsoon downpour is, in effect, a stress test that no press release or ribbon-cutting ceremony can fake. Calumpit is illustrative precisely because it is not an isolated case — the Department of Public Works and Highways’ (DPWH) own data show Bulacan received more flood control funding than any other province in the country, and yet towns like Calumpit continue to flood as though none of that money was ever spent. Investigations into so-called ghost projects — flood-control structures marked complete on paper but never properly built, or built with substandard materials — have already implicated contractors and at least one dismissed DPWH engineer in the area. The floodwater does not lie about what was and wasn’t actually built beneath it.
The EDSA potholes tell a smaller but equally revealing version of the same story. This was not some decades-old road nobody had touched. It was freshly rehabilitated pavement, marketed by the DPWH as using high-grade asphalt and modern paving technology, in a project meant to restore public confidence after the flood control corruption scandal. It disintegrated within days of heavy rain because of a basic, foreseeable drainage flaw. If a P6-billion flagship project can’t survive a single monsoon season, the question isn’t really about asphalt. It’s about who signed off on it, who inspected it and who got paid regardless.
Las Piñas, template of failed governance?
I don’t have to look far to see how corruption pervades governance. On Aug. 8, what should have been a short drive home turned into more than two hours on the road, because knee-deep floodwaters at Zapote Junction in Las Piñas City forced me to reroute entirely. That intersection sits along the Las Piñas-Zapote River Drive, a flood-control project initiated over a decade ago specifically to solve this exact problem. Yet residents there still deal with the same flooding year after year, and this particular episode was severe enough that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. himself later ordered the DPWH to revive a long-delayed spillway project for the area. What happened to the flood control infrastructure that was supposed to prevent this?
When I finally got home, there was no water coming out of the tap — a small inconvenience next to a flooded highway, but another sign of basic services failing exactly when residents need them most. The next morning, the streets were lined with potholes, as if the city needed one more reminder of how little of what gets funded actually holds up.
It’s hard not to connect this to the state of local leadership. Las Piñas’ representative, Mark Anthony Santos, built his political career, and his 2025 upset win over then-senator Cynthia Villar, largely on criticizing the Villar family’s decadeslong grip on the city and its infrastructure record. It’s a fair critique as far as it goes, but criticizing the previous status quo is not the same as fixing it, and constituents wading through the same floodwaters this August have little to show for the change in leadership. It seems that Santos is all talk — berating the Villars for all that is bad and even including Maynilad in one of his reels — but has not delivered anything viable to the Las Piñeros.
Meanwhile, the Aguilar family, allied with Santos and effectively in control of the mayor’s office since Las Piñas became a city, has simply rotated the same two people — Imelda Aguilar and her daughter, April Aguilar-Nery — between the mayor and vice mayor posts for years. Whichever side is out front, an Aguilar or an ally has been in charge of executive decisions in this city for a very long time. Trading one dynasty’s rhetoric for another’s incumbency has not, by the evidence on the ground, translated into flood control that works. The daily heavy traffic mess in Alabang-Zapote Road is another story to tell.
Filipinos deserve better
None of this is unique to Calumpit or Las Piñas. The same situation repeats itself in flood-prone areas across the country every time the rains come: money allocated, projects declared complete and communities left to wade through the consequences regardless of who occupies the local seat of power. Disasters will keep happening — that much is beyond anyone’s control.
What isn’t beyond anyone’s control is whether the projects meant to protect us from them are actually built the way they were paid for. Until officials treat that as the standard to be held to, rather than a talking point to be recited after the next flood, Filipinos will keep discovering — the hard way, knee-deep in water — exactly how much of their money never made it into the ground, but into politicians’ pockets.
Factual sources: Rappler (Aug. 22 and Dec. 3, 2025), The Manila Times, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, GMA News (Aug. 9-12, 2026) on Calumpit’s flood control projects and state of calamity, the EDSA rehabilitation pothole controversy, MMDA flood advisories.
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