The flood is the color of an unflushed toilet.
It carries garbage, animal feces, human waste, dead rats and the urine of living ones. It dredges whatever has been decomposing inside canals and sewers, then pours the mixture into streets, homes and classrooms.
Children splash through it. Workers wade through it. Parents carry babies above it while the water presses against their own bodies.
You do not need to see an open wound to be at risk. Bacteria can enter through microscopic abrasions, the eyes, nose and mouth—and possibly through skin softened by hours in floodwater.
Inside that warm, brown sludge may be Leptospira: spiral-shaped bacteria shed through the urine of infected rats and other animals.
You may scrub away the smell when you get home.
The bacteria may already be inside you.
The flood enters the body
Leptospirosis can initially resemble an ordinary flu: fever, chills, headache, muscle pain, vomiting or red eyes.
That is what makes it treacherous.
The water disappears. The mud dries. Then, days later, the body begins paying the bill.
In severe cases, the infection can attack the kidneys, liver, lungs, heart and brain. Urine output can fall as the kidneys fail. What looked like a passing fever can end in dialysis, intensive care—or death.
Flooding does not merely accompany the disease.
It creates the mass exposure that allows it to spread.
The flood is still rising—inside hospitals
People infected during the latest floods may still be walking around without symptoms. They have not yet entered the statistics.
Leptospirosis commonly incubates for five to 15 days. Hospital admissions have historically peaked roughly two weeks after intense rainfall.
As of August 22, the Department of Health had recorded 4,285 leptospirosis cases nationwide. It recorded 495 cases from July 26 to August 8—29 percent more than the 383 reported during the preceding two weeks.
That is a 29-percent increase in only two weeks—and the data may still be trailing the latest floods.
The official count tells us how many have already become sick. It cannot tell us how many are becoming sick now.
The National Kidney and Transplant Institute reached full bed capacity and temporarily restricted walk-in admissions.
San Lazaro Hospital erected additional tents as its caseload climbed to 135 patients, including 31 new admissions. Six patients had died there since August 10.
The flood may have disappeared from our streets, but it is still rising inside our hospitals.
After Ondoy in 2009, the country recorded 2,089 leptospirosis cases and 162 deaths.
Rain. Flood. Exposure. Fever. Kidney failure. Funeral.
Then, before the next monsoon, collective amnesia.
Lest we forget
Nature supplies the rain.
But drainage, sanitation, flood control and urban planning determine whether that rain becomes a public-health emergency.
Climate change may explain increasingly violent rainfall—it cannot explain every clogged canal, collapsed structure, substandard project or flood-control system that existed only on paper.
The flood-control scandal was disappearing beneath newer controversies and louder political fights.
That did not mean the scandal had been resolved. It merely meant public attention had moved elsewhere.
The investigations remained unfinished. The allegations remained unanswered. The public money remained spent.
And communities remained vulnerable to the same water they were promised protection from.
Then the floods returned—and brought the evidence back with them, not merely through submerged homes, but through fever, kidney failure and death.
A ghost project does not remain a ghost.
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When the rain comes, it acquires a body.
Where are they now?
While ordinary Filipinos wade through sewage and rat urine, where are the people accused of profiting from flood-control projects?
They are not the delivery riders pushing motorcycles through human waste.
They are not the parents carrying children above the water while exposing themselves to infection.
They are not the workers choosing between losing a day’s wage and entering floodwater that could put them in intensive care two weeks later.
Between July 2022 and May 2025, the government funded 9,855 flood-control projects worth more than ₱545 billion.
An official review found that only 15 of more than 2,000 accredited contractors obtained 20 percent of the total budget. Investigations and audits subsequently flagged projects alleged to be substandard, poorly documented or nonexistent.
Not every failed project is corrupt, and every accused person is entitled to due process.
But due process must not become another excuse for endless delay, selective amnesia and no accountability.
How many investigations have Filipinos watched begin with televised outrage, continue through weeks of hearings and end without money recovered or anyone punished?
We know the ritual.
Officials promise a full investigation. Committees summon witnesses. Cameras record angry speeches.
Then another controversy arrives, attention moves on and the public is left waiting for conclusions that never seem to come.
But flood-control corruption is not a controversy that disappears when the cameras leave.
It returns every rainy season.
It rises through the floorboards. It enters people’s homes. It destroys appliances bought through years of work. It closes schools, paralyses livelihoods and forces families into water contaminated by sewage and rat urine.
Money allegedly diverted from flood-control projects was not stolen from an abstract budget.
It was stolen from the walls that should have held.
From the drains that should have cleared.
From the hospitals now running out of beds.
And from every Filipino forced to wade through water that government spending was supposed to keep away.
The human cost is already standing in emergency rooms.
Leptospirosis can occur without flooding. But floods turn scattered contamination into mass exposure. Without preventable flooding, fewer Filipinos would be forced into contaminated water.
No flood-control system can stop every flood, particularly as extreme weather intensifies.
But billions were not spent so officials and contractors could blame the sky whenever communities disappeared beneath brown water.
Nature may send the rain.
Government decides whether public money becomes protection—or plunder.
The deepest filth
There are two forms of contamination in this story.
One enters through broken skin, the eyes, the nose and the mouth.
The other enters through signatures, contracts, kickbacks and public money.
One can destroy the kidneys, liver and lungs.
The other destroys the infrastructure that might have prevented the exposure.
The two forms of filth meet in the floodwater.
One is carried by rats.
The other is carried by people who dress better, speak more carefully and know exactly what they are doing.
Rats act by instinct. Bacteria do not know whom they kill.
But anyone who steals from flood-control funds knows that when the water rises, someone else will be forced to wade through the consequences.
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