ON Sunday, Oct. 11, 2026, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said this during a media interview in Singapore: “Bumili na kayo ng balde para ‘pag umulan, makokolekta na ninyo lahat (Buy pails/buckets already so that when it rains, you can collect it all).”
He mentioned this while discussing household-level preparations and water-collection strategies in response to looming dry spells and El Niño, alongside government initiatives like cloud-seeding and water filtration support. The media interview where he made the “balde” statement took place before he attended the F1 Grand Prix event.
President Marcos’ statement, whether he said it on his own, or was fed into saying it by his staff, is a clear example of poor government advice.
To be fair, collecting rainwater is sound household practice, and the Palace says the advice was part of a broader plan: filtration training from the Department of Social Welfare and Development, and cloud-seeding. The seeming fiasco is that a bucket was offered where a system should have been. The state weather bureau warns that a super El Niño is likely to develop between October and December 2026, and may persist until March 2027, with all provinces expected to experience drought next year (Philippine Daily Inquirer, Oct. 13). A threat of that scale is answered with engineering: supply, storage, distribution and loss reduction, designed, costed and delivered by people who are accountable for the result.
What the engineering record shows
Consider Metro Manila. Angat Dam, commissioned in 1967, supplies over 90 percent of the metropolitan area’s bulk water. Government researchers have flagged the risks of leaning so heavily on one reservoir, among them sedimentation and the possibility of dam failure in an earthquake (pids.gov.ph). On the distribution side, the World Bank reports that nonrevenue water in the West Zone has fallen from 68 percent in 1997 to 29.7 percent, and in the East Zone from 63 percent to about 13.6 percent. That progress came largely through replacing more than 3,200 kilometers of aging pipelines in the West Zone since 2007 (www.worldbank.org/en/news). These are engineering results, and they show what sustained technical work can do. They also show how much remains: In the West Zone, nearly three of every 10 liters produced still do not reach a paying customer.
Outside Metro Manila, the picture is less encouraging, and here the bucket advice is most telling. Republic Act (RA) 6716, enacted in 1989, directs the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to build water wells and rainwater collectors, and to develop springs in all “barangay” (villages), with every barangay to have at least one additional potable water source. A 2010 Senate resolution noted that the DPWH had not carried this out in the preceding 21 years (legacy.senate.gov.ph/lisdata/74696033!.pdf). In 2019 and again in 2023, lawmakers were still asking for the law to be implemented (Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 17, 2023). Put plainly, rainwater collection was assigned to the government 37 years ago. Asking households to buy their own buckets hands back to citizens a task that Congress gave to the government.
Here is the problem. The Department of Economy, Planning and Development describes the water sector’s institutional framework as fragmented, and notes the existence of an interagency committee on water resources composed of 32 member agencies (depdev.gov.ph). Integrating that many mandates into one coherent plan, with one accountable technical authority, is classic engineering work: define the system, set the specifications, measure performance, fix what fails.
Who sits in the Cabinet
The president’s own educational record lies in the social sciences and business: a special diploma from Oxford, and postgraduate study at Wharton that he said he was unable to complete. At the Department of Public Works and Highways, Secretary Vince Dizon is an economist, and has said that he once dreamed of becoming an engineer. The Energy secretary, Sharon Garin, is a lawyer and accountant. This is not to say that no engineer sits in the Cabinet: Housing Secretary Jose Ramon Aliling is a civil engineer. The narrower point is that, in the portfolios that carry the heaviest load in an El Niño year, public works and energy, technical training is not what the appointments reflect.
What the country needs is engineering competence bound to engineering accountability: licensed professionals who sign their work, answer for it, and publish the technical basis of their decisions for independent audit.
What engineering advice would look like
Before the dry season deepens, the public should be told in numbers: reservoir levels, how much water is allocated to households and to irrigation, and at what trigger rationing begins. Loss reduction should be treated as a source of supply, since every percentage point of nonrevenue water recovered is water that needs no new dam.
RA 6716 should be implemented as written, with engineered, treated, community-scale catchments in place of improvised ones. Dependence on Angat Dam should be reduced through additional sources, and water governance should be consolidated under a technically led authority with clear accountability. None of this is complex. Each item is a matter of design, funding and follow-through.
A government facing a super El Niño should lead with a plan that engineers can defend, and then, perhaps, mention the “balde.”
allinsight.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/
All.Insight.Manila.Times
Viber: (0915)4201085