Come June, “I hope we can toast together,” Manila Water Consortium president Gerardo Ablaza Jr. said. Toast what?
Cheer the P1.1 billion Cebu Bulk Water Project when it will turn taps on. Then, 143 other cities will watch 35 million liters of surface water, from 40 kilometers away, start flowing daily into a metropolis parched into perennial crisis.
There’s no substitute for water. “The threshold requirement to meet basic human needs is 20 liters per person daily,” UN’s Human Development Report states. And six out of ten Filipinos lack clean water. “Ang taong malayo sa tubig, ay huwag hanapin ng linis.” (“He who is far from water should not expect to be clean.”), a Filipino axiom says.
The Philippines ranks second in diarrhea-related deaths among children below five. Water could further whittle down 29 deaths per 100,000 births. Compare that to Thailand’s 15. These preventable deaths fracture the right of a child to celebrate his first birthday.
Since 1993, UN member nations mark “World Water Day” on March 22. Rites here range from planting 7,000 mangroves propagules in Bacoor Bay to a concert at Glorietta. A science forum unreels in Singapore — where rains peter out mid-January.
Contrary to myth, Asia does not have abundant freshwater assets. Filipinos have 6,332 cubic meters available yearly. Malaysians have four times that, Canadians 12. Saudi Arabians have only 118 cubic meters. But they swap oil for water.
Cities to barangays lag in conservation. The Rainwater Catchment Law requires local governments to save rainwater. So, why hasn’t anybody built cisterns, as required by RA 6716? Not a single centavo, from the pork barrels of Jinggoy Estrada, Juan Ponce Enrile, Bong Revilla and 79 others, went for cisterns.
Many LGUs fixate on bagging Internal Revenue Allotment slabs to boost personal allowances or craft “waiting shed” projects. To “compel government to implement a law stillborn from cynical indifference,” Magsaysay Awardee Antonio Oposa asked the Supreme Court to issue its first writ of kalikasan ever.
Future summers will be hotter— and permanently so — as the equatorial “band of rain” shifts, University of Washington scientists caution. Early March, farms in provinces like Maguindanao and Albay were scorched from lack of rain.
The promised June toast, for a Metro Cebu of 12 cities and towns, offers welcome contrast. Until today, 9 out of 10 cubic meters of water, quaffed in Cebu, were siphoned from limestone underground reservoirs. Most were drawn by unregulated wells. In-migration and industries quadrupled demand for water in half a century.
Over-pumping allowed seawater to seep in “more than ten kilometers inland If groundwater extraction continues, wells as far inland Talamban, will be irreversibly contaminated, come 2025,” Japan International Cooperation Agency, reported Thursday. About a fourth will be wrecked for good. It’d take five centuries to flush out tainted aquifers.
This contamination has wrecked the city’s main source of water up to now. Metropolitan Cebu Water District serves less than half of city households. A quarter of the projected new supply is about equal the volume of freshwater lost to consumers every day, MCWD’s Ernie Delco said. It will take more just to stay put.
Rainfall that seeps into groundwater tables, specially in the key Maghaway Valley cannot equal extraction rate in a province scalped down to two-percent forest cover. “The rain in Spain / stays mainly on the plain,” Eliza Doolittle sang in the 1964 Broadway play, “My Fair Lady”. Not so here. Most of the rain ends in the sea as runoff.
Yet, there was no shortage of red flags. At Water Resources Center of San Carlos University San Carlos, Fr. Herman Van Engelen, SVD warned City Hall, “Your children will never drink from those wells unless the intrusion of salt into aquifers is stopped – now.” That was 1975.
WRC tracked, over the next four decades, the saline edge advance from a seashore foothold to 12 kilometers inland, wrecking aquifers irreversibly.
Former Mayor Tomas Osmeña’s three terms offered a window of opportunity to start reversing Cebu’s skid into ecological disaster but he instead opted for denial. “What water shortage?” he’d dismiss warnings from Asian Development Bank to Delft University .
Osmeña bridged multiplying needs by overpumping already depleted aquifers. He signaled ecological policy insolvency last year by hiring a water diviner. “Lola Choleng is 100-percent accurate,” he told Cebu Daily News. “But voodoo didn’t resolve a crisis which he insisted didn’t exist.” He was thrashed in the last elections, barely scraping through in his barangay.
“We will not be trapped into similar inaction,” then Cebu Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia vowed when she signed her province’s first-ever surface bulk water agreement with Manila Water Consortium. In this “Private-Public Partnership” project, Capitol put money where its mouth is. It plunked down P49 out of every P100 for the project; the Ayala-led firm put in P51.
Mint-new governor Hilario Davide Jr. inherited, willy-nilly, the first ever breakaway from overreliance on wrecking aquifers and shifting to groundwater.
Even when toasts are offered, come June, “there’d still be a 15-40-percent shortfall in Cebu water supplies.
How well Davide handles this breathing spell will define his future. “History is a relentless master,” John F. Kennedy warned. “It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast to the past is to be swept aside.”
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