Somewhere in Metro Manila this morning, someone is posting a photo of coffee by the window, captioned with some version of ang ganda ng weather, sana all pahinga. Not far from that window, a family in Rizal is arranging a wake for someone the floodwater took over the weekend. Somewhere else — Benguet, maybe, or a low-lying barangay along the Marikina — people are standing on a roof right now, watching the water climb, waiting for a rescue boat that hasn’t come yet.

I’m not writing this as either of those people. I’m the guy in between — the one who got mildly, expensively, embarrassingly inconvenienced last night trying to get home, and who’s uncomfortable enough about that to actually sit with why.

The Weather Is Not the Same Weather for Everyone

Here’s the thing about a red rainfall warning: it describes rainfall, not risk. On paper, everyone under it gets the same millimeters. In practice, “bad weather” means a cancelled outdoor lunch for one person and a flooded sari-sari store for another, sometimes on the same street.

This isn’t new information and I’m aware saying it out loud doesn’t fix anything. But it’s worth saying anyway, because the gap keeps getting treated like an inconvenience gradient — some of us just got mildly rained on, some of us got really rained on — when it’s actually a different axis entirely. It’s not about how much rain fell on your particular roof. It’s about whether you have a roof that holds, a job that survives a flood day, and money enough that a canceled commute is a mood and not a missed shift.

The Philippines gets this same test every year, for months at a stretch, not as a freak event but as a season with a name. This year alone it’s already been Tropical Depression Luis, then Maymay, now the southwest monsoon — Habagat — doing what Habagat does every August, stacking day after day of rain on top of ground that never got the chance to dry out from the last one. Some of us experience that as a scheduling problem. A lot of the country experiences it as the annual event that decides whether this is the year the water reaches the mattress.

Last Night

I’ll be honest about where I actually sit on that spectrum, because the contrast is the point. I wasn’t wading through anything. I was standing under an awning with a phone, watching my Grab booking get accepted, then cancelled, then accepted again at a fare that had quietly tripled, for a ride that should take fifteen minutes and within a five-to-ten-kilometer radius from where I was standing.

I told myself I’d pay it. Surge pricing during a red warning isn’t exactly a moral outrage — drivers are risking flooded streets and zero-visibility roads too, and asking them to eat that risk for a normal fare isn’t fair either. So I said yes to two, then three times the usual price. And still: nothing. Driver after driver looked at the trip, looked at the water on the road between us, and understandably declined.

So I did what you do when the app stops working, which is stand on the actual street and try to flag down a taxi — something I’ll admit I hadn’t done in years, because taxis in Metro Manila have quietly become a last resort. Between the meter-tampering complaints, the “off-route” scams, and enough stories about unsafe rides that most of us defaulted to apps years ago, hailing a cab off the street now feels almost quaint, in a bad way. Ten taxis, maybe more, either sped past or waved me off before I found one that stopped.

The driver’s name was Lando — Mang Lando, in the respectful-elder way Filipinos default to for a driver who’s clearly been doing this since before ride-hailing apps existed. I braced for the “off-meter” negotiation that’s basically standard practice in weather like this. He didn’t ask. He just flagged the meter down and started driving.

What Mang Lando Actually Said

I asked him about it somewhere around the third flooded intersection, half expecting him to tell me the fare would change once we hit worse water. He didn’t. He said, more or less, that plenty of drivers jack up the price on nights like this because they can — and he doesn’t blame them, everyone’s trying to make rent the same as him — but that he’d rather have a full night of honest, metered trips than a few overpriced ones and an empty backseat after word gets around.

“We all just wanted to survive, if not thrive,” he told me.

I’ve turned that line over more than I expected to since. It’s the kind of thing that gets said constantly in this country and usually functions as a shrug — the sentence you reach for when there’s no fixing the actual problem, so you cope instead. Coming from Mang Lando, in a metered cab, in a flood, it landed differently. It wasn’t resignation. It was closer to a decision. He’d looked at the same incentive everyone else on the road that night was following — charge more, because you can, because everyone else is — and picked survival with his integrity attached instead of survival at whatever markup the weather would bear.

That’s not a small thing to hold onto in a country where the actual, structural version of “charge more because you can” has cost lives.

The Money That Was Supposed to Fix This

I’m not going to turn this into the audit — that’s a different piece, for a different day, and it deserves more room than a paragraph here. But it’s impossible to sit in a flooded taxi and not think about where the money went.

The government has poured close to ₱2 trillion into flood control since 2011, the bulk of it in just the last four years. Senate investigators now estimate that a genuinely staggering share of that — Senator Panfilo Lacson has put it as high as 60% in some years — never became a drainage canal or a pumping station at all. It became “ghost” projects: money paid out for flood walls that were never poured, riverbanks that were never reinforced, all logged as completed in a government database that nobody checked against the actual riverbank. Investigators have confirmed hundreds of these so far, out of thousands still being reviewed, and the commission set up to chase it all down wound up its work back in March without ever reaching most of the people who actually signed off on the money.

So when the rain comes now, the frustration isn’t just “why does this keep happening.” It’s “we already paid for this not to happen, and someone spent that money on something else.”

Not every city failed at it, which almost makes it worse. Marikina — the same city whose river alarm opened this piece — rebuilt its whole relationship to flooding after Ondoy killed 35 people there in 2009, and it shows: real dredging, real river walls, a warning system residents actually trust. Iloilo did something similar with a flood project finished back in 2011 that’s still holding. Pasig is still mid-build on its own masterplan, openly, publicly, with a mayor who’s been unusually loud about wanting the receipts on every peso — proof that “still fixing it” and “pretending to fix it” are not the same category of failure. It can be done. It’s just, apparently, optional.

Getting Home

I got home a little after midnight, ₱120 on the meter, no surcharge, no argument. I said thank you probably more times than necessary. Mang Lando just nodded like it wasn’t worth the fuss.

It shouldn’t have been remarkable. A driver charged the fare the meter said, on a night when everyone would have understood if he hadn’t. That it was remarkable is the actual story here — not the flooding, which is annual and predictable and, per the audit, largely preventable, but the fact that basic fairness now reads as an exception worth writing eight hundred words about.

Somewhere out there, someone’s still posting about the nice weather for a nap. Somewhere else, a family in Rizal or Benguet is grieving someone the water actually took. And somewhere in between, a taxi driver decided that surviving didn’t have to mean taking more than he was owed. If there’s a solution in any of this, it probably looks less like a trillion-peso infrastructure line item and more like Mang Lando’s version of it: doing the fair thing anyway, even when the whole system around you is built to reward not doing that.

We all just wanted to survive, if not thrive. He’s not wrong. I just wish more of the people holding the money agreed with him.