IF you are a farmer endowed with a just a tiny wee bit of discernment and curiosity, you will have to wonder about what is at the root of the sheer incompetence of the people manning the country’s major irrigation and multipurpose dams. Why can’t the dam administrators, you wonder, just calibrate and time the water releases from the dams during heavy rains to prevent the massive loss of lives and property? There are universal protocols on water releases under these trying circumstances and the dam administrators simply have to follow these protocols.

And after Typhoon “Ondoy” (international name: “Ketsana”) and the massive flooding that it unleashed on vast parts of Luzon — killing dozens of people and destroying billions of pesos worth of private and public property in the process — dear lessons should have been learned by the agencies that manage and oversee the major dams, the National Irrigation Administration (NIA) in particular. It was the recklessness of the water releases from the Luzon dams during the peak of Ondoy’s fury that abetted the mass killing and the massive destruction of property. Without the reckless releases from the dams, floodwaters would not have buried three-story structures at the Provident Village in Marikina, low-lying areas in Cainta and several towns of Rizal. There would have been no senseless loss of human lives. The economic toll, too, would have been moderate.