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This entry is about something both the Philippines and the USA has in common. That would be flooding.

Growing up in the Philippines, every typhoon (hurricane) would have us scrambling away from being near the river. I lost count how many times we had to pack up everything and move over and over. When I was a child, I asked why we had to live so close to the river and keep moving back and forth. The answer was simple then. We didn’t have the money to live someplace safe. That was life when you were poor.

Did we avoid all of the floods? No we didn’t and those memories are permanently in my mind. I never would want my family or me to go through that again. But the common part was we would get a lot of rainfall and the rivers would swell and run over their banks. The damage was limited to the standard flood areas usually.

So how is it different in the USA especially now? The first thing to understand is just how incredibly big the USA is. The Philippines has 115,830 sq. miles of land with all of the islands combined. The USA has 3,537,441 square miles of land. The state of Wisconsin alone is 54,310 sq miles. The Philippines is roughly the size of just Wisconsin and Iowa combined. California is bigger than the Philippines by itself with 163,707 sq miles. So a flood in the USA which is impacting parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan is affecting enough land to cover the Philippines twice over.

In the USA, many of the rivers are held back by dams and levees which try to control the direction of the rivers. Some of these constructions are failing which leads to flooding in the parts that just couldn’t handle all of the water. Also many of the rivers in the Mid-West drain into the Mississippi river which grows to very large sizes.

So what is the main difference? In the Philippines, we know when it is going to flood as there isn’t much we can do about it. In the USA, some get too comfortable with the man-made protections and lose much when nature wins. But when it hits the center of the country it hits the farmers and we all know what that means later at the grocery store.

Anah

“If the shoe fits, wear it.”

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