Living with water

The Kansai International Airport (KIX) in Japan opened in 1994 on an artificial island in Osaka Bay; it now sits on two. The seabed there lies 18 meters down, under rock and soil dumped from three nearby mountains, over a soft layer of Holocene clay that was drained through millions of sand drains. Under the weight of the landfill and the structures above it, the first island has settled by 13 meters. Yet it remains a busy airport, operating 24 hours and serving about 30 million passengers a year. The engineers expected the ground to sink. What they got wrong was by how much and how fast. Their forecasts covered the clay they had drained; the surprise came from Pleistocene layers hundreds of meters below. By 1990, before the airport opened, the island had settled well beyond prediction. To compensate for the subsidence that continues to this day, the engineers secured the airport with gigantic columns and jacks that can lift entire sections of the terminal. They missed out badly only once, in September 2018, when Typhoon 'Jebi' drove unusually high storm surges across Osaka Bay. Waves overtopped the seawall and flooded a runway and the terminal basements. An unmoored tanker was blown into the bridge linking the airport to the mainland. Full operations resumed in two weeks. With the airport running, 6 kilometers of the surrounding seawall was raised over three years. It was the second time this happened. The wall was first raised after a 2004 flooding. But Jebi exceeded it. Still, the Japanese engineers did not treat the water as insurmountable. They built a system for it and corrected the system when it failed. The recent floods in Metro Manila, Bulacan, and Pampanga revived the question whether we can ever control flooding in the places on which the core of our metropolis stands. Perhaps this is the wrong question. The better one might be: what would it take to keep urban life viable where recurrent flooding is a fact of life? The comparison with Kansai is instructive precisely because an airport is not a city. KIX is a single organization, with one operator, and a crew of engineers who have been taking yearly readings of the subsidence at fixed points since 1987. A metropolis has no such body. What looks like ingenuity in the Japanese case is an arrangement in which measuring, remembering, and correcting are somebody's designated job. For better or worse, our ancestors built beside the sea and the rivers, as one would in an archipelago. Our towns and cities grew on ground made unstable by monsoon rains, typhoons, storm surges, and the swelling of rivers from the mountains. They learned to adapt. What changed was the scale: farmland and marsh converted into subdivisions, groundwater pumped until the coastal towns began sinking faster than the sea was rising, and an engineering system that promised finality instead of regular maintenance Flood control, in short, is not merely an engineering problem but a governance problem that presumes institutional memory, continuous monitoring, and a reliable system of warnings. The engineering is the manageable part; solutions tried elsewhere are available. What is lacking is the memory. We remember the disasters and their magnitude, far less the adjustments that followed, and almost nothing about whether they worked. The reason is not a character flaw. In a functionally differentiated society, as Niklas Luhmann argued, there is no single entity in which such a memory could be stored. Each sector retains only what its own code can process. Politics remembers the culprits, because we keep an exact record of who stole the flood control money, even as we set this aside at election time. Media remembers events, because news requires novelty and faces. Science remembers the hydrology, but its warnings do not bind anyone. No one asks how well the Manggahan Floodway performed, and what we changed afterward? Its designers go uncredited; such projects draw attention only when they fail. This is why a flood changes nothing even though it is everywhere at once. Luhmann wrote that a system genuinely resonates when it actually reorganizes its operations in response to environmental events. It does not merely talk about the environment while operating as before. Much of what we do after a catastrophic flood is to express irritation, assign blame, or write bills in the futile hope that ecological problems can be solved by law. Then, there is the paradox that surfaces wherever protection succeeds: as when an effective solution to flooding invites continued settlement of the very areas it protects, by informal settlers with nowhere else to go and by developers who carve housing projects out of low-lying farmland. Every solution creates the conditions of the next problem. The engineers at Kansai Airport did not stop the sinking. Instead, they provided for a system of continuous adjustment. That is the part we have not copied. —————- public.lives@gmail.com