Water woes in Metro Cebu

I was getting ready for a meeting last Friday when heavy rainfall and the consequent flooding again hit Metro Cebu for the second time last week. Since my colleagues and I knew better than to get stuck for uncertain number of hours in the heavy traffic or worse, amid swirling waters, so we decided to move our discussion to another day.

While we get inundated with unwelcome waters in the streets that go straight into our polluted waterways, contaminating them again with the debris and hazardous discharges resulting from our uncaring ways, we also sigh at the intermittent disruption of our water supply in our households.

Residents in Mandaue City, the area now avoided by taxi drivers because of the traffic congestion and heavy flooding, have been suffering for weeks now from lack of regular water supply.

I wonder how many households and barangays have water reservoirs or rain water catchments to help solve the water problem confronting us?

Republic Act 6716, enacted in 1989, requires the construction of water wells, rainwater collectors, development of springs and rehabilitation of existing water wells in all barangays in the country. It is another unimplemented environmental law that some officials feign not to know.

Senator Loren Legarda, the active chairperson of the Environment Committee of the Senate, exhorts each household to have water catchment basins as they “bring multiple benefits of water conservation, flood prevention and food production.”

I remember Tony Oposa filing the first writ of kalikasan petition under the 2010 Rules of Procedure for Environmental Cases to compel all pertinent state agencies to comply with their mandates under said law. The government committed to implement them. A consent decree was issued. It is possible the Department of Public Works and Highways integrated the installation of water catchments and reservoirs in its budget. But without the active collaboration of the local government units, which are vested with the primary responsibility that should trickle down to the constituents’ sense of responsibility to have them, the law, like others, suffers the same fate. They are empty, and we are now suffering the consequences, also wrongfully attributed as  “the wrath of nature.”

We should be mature enough to accept that, yes, we are the culprit, never Nature. We cut down trees, for all kinds of reasons, which is shameful considering that Cebu has less than one percent forest cover. I hope DENR corrects this figure and state what the real state of our forest is. Naturally, with a denuded forest, water rolls down heavily. Flash floods sweep away whatever stands in its path. Is it then the fault of Nature that flooding is now a regular occurrence in Cebu?

Too much water at the wrong places and a drip in households should be wake-up calls for all of us to look at solutions – now, not tomorrow or decades after.

I was still a college student when I heard about the saltwater intrusion a kilometer away from  Cebu City’s shores. But, four decades and millions of residents thereafter, still the same problem confronts us and seemingly has not been taken seriously by both local and national government authorities.

Yes, there are leaders such as Tony Oposa Jr. and from nongovernment organizations who had been in the forefront to foster action from the public sector. But their advocacy and pleas have fallen on deaf ears, to everyone’s extreme disadvantage.

It is timely to have received  last Friday a letter about the sordid and alarming state of the water resources in Cebu from Jose “Joe”  Gapas, the President and Chairperson of the Board of the Soil and Water Conservation Foundation, Inc. (SWCFI). The NGO has proposed and awaits feedback from the President on the creation of the urgently-needed Cebu Water Resources Management Authority through an Executive Order.

A portion of his heartbreaking note addressed to Director Silvino Tejada of the Bureau of Soils and Water Management reads, as follows:

“…In the last fifty (50) years, all the four river systems that cross  Cebu City have dried up; the land intrusion of seawater has increased from less than a kilometer from the shoreline to more than four (4) kilometers inland and the water table has deepened from seventy (70) feet to more than five hundred (500) feet. If nothing is done now to stop and reverse the environmental disaster in Cebu, in the next fifty years, the water table will deepen to a thousand (1000) feet down, the landward intrusion of seawater shall have reached more than eight (8) kilometers from the shoreline and most likely all remaining rivers still with water shall have dried up.”

We hope our political agencies and citizens will join hands to solve the water and environmental crisis buffeting us. Surely, we cannot afford to see our beloved Cebu become a ghost of its old vibrant, dynamic and sustainable self.