Ghost Projects, Real Floods

The Committee on Public Accounts, led by Rep. Terry Ridon, has begun pulling at the loose threads of our flood control programs—and what is emerging is a tapestry of ghost projects, substandard materials, and brazen collusion.

At the Monday Circle forum, Ridon laid out the early contours of the investigation. The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has already met twice with the committee and is preparing a list of projects to be examined. (Photo: Small But Terry Ridon Facebook)

This is no ordinary probe. It is a reckoning over billions in taxpayers’ money meant to keep our communities safe from rising waters, but which instead drowned them in corruption.

At the Monday Circle forum, Ridon laid out the early contours of the investigation. The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has already met twice with the committee and is preparing a list of projects to be examined.

But even before the documents arrive, stories abound: engineers signing off on “completed” projects that exist only on paper; contractors pocketing funds for flood defenses that were never built; bridges collapsing not because of faulty designs, but because substandard materials were used.

The most damning example came from Isabela, where the Cabagan Bridge crumbled despite DPWH’s assurances of a sound design. If the blueprint was correct, Ridon argued, then the collapse could only be traced to the materials themselves.

Here, steel and stone gave way not to water, but to greed.

This is why the committee’s work matters. The issue is not just whether projects were finished. It is whether lawmakers themselves—some with cozy ties to favored contractors—enabled the fraud.

Ridon hinted that those implicated could recuse themselves, but that is hardly enough.

When public outrage snowballs, as it has after the recent trifecta of typhoons that swamped Metro Manila and Calumpit, Bulacan, what is demanded is not courtesy but accountability.

The Commission on Audit (COA) has also been summoned, this time to explain how identical projects in different barangays could carry wildly different price tags. Such disparities point not to oversight, but to deliberate manipulation.

Add to this the pattern of awarding multi-billion peso contracts to companies with laughably tiny paid-up capital, and the picture grows darker still.

Ridon remains hopeful that whistleblowers will emerge.

They must. Because only from within the machinery of deceit can the full story be told: how DPWH signatures were bought, how “completion certificates” were conjured, and how citizens were defrauded twice—first of their money, then of their safety.

The President has promised a fraud audit. Citizens, now emboldened, demand nothing less than a full excavation of these ghost projects. Floodwaters recede; but the memory of betrayal, unless met with justice, will linger.

In the end, what drowns us is not the storm surge but the swamp of corruption. (Photo: Michael Peronce Wikimedia Commons)

In the end, what drowns us is not the storm surge but the swamp of corruption. And if Congress cannot drain it, the people themselves will ask: who, then, are these flood projects really meant to protect?

The ghost projects now in the crosshairs of Congress are not isolated anomalies.

They belong to a long, troubling lineage of flood control mismanagement already flagged by COA.

Just last year, COA disclosed that the government paid at least ₱27 million in penalties for delays in foreign-funded flood control projects—delays never fully explained to the public.

These penalties represented more than lost time; they were hard evidence of systemic negligence.

Auditors have also noted cases where project costs ballooned without justification, or where infrastructure supposedly completed was nowhere to be found.

In some localities, old tires and sandbags became makeshift dikes for desperate residents, while official documents insisted that multi-million peso flood defenses had already been built.