It’s two months until the rainy season and yet the relief from the dry spell caused by the El Niño cannot come soon enough for Metro Cebu residents, who have endured the longest, hottest dry period in the country’s history.
Along with the heat came the drop in water levels, with some of the province’s dams drying up. The problem had started since last year and despite the series of meetings, both the Cebu City government and the provincial government had largely failed to solve the problem.
Former Cebu governor Lito Osmeña, who offered to supply water to upland barangays in Cebu City, pointed out the main problem in October last year; there’s a lack of coordination between the Metro Cebu Water District (MCWD) and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) as far as distribution of the water supply is concerned.
He also correctly pointed out the main problem in Metro Cebu’s water supply; that regardless of whether there’s a drought or not, there will always be inadequate distribution of water especially in the uplands because the water distribution facilities have not been upgraded for years.
The MCWD signed a bulk water supply agreement two years ago but even they admitted that they don’t have the facilities to channel and distribute the water from Carmen town to both their household and commercial customers.
Which is why they’ve tied up with other water providers to help them distribute water to their customers. We’re not even talking about the declining groundwater resources in the province due to the growing demand for water especially in the Metro Cebu area.
For now both the Cebu city and provincial governments have resorted to palliative measures to ease, rather than address directly the water shortage problems faced by households and the farmers.
In fact, the reason probably why the city and provincial governments have been so slow in reacting to the water shortage problem is their dependence on the state weather bureau Pagasa which has so far refused to declare the province as suffering from an El Niño drought.
The reason being, as they said, that Cebu had some intermittent rains which while insufficient, was enough for them to declare the province as suffering only from a mild dry spell and not a drought.
But debating over definitions won’t help solve the severe water shortage problem experienced in the province. While Osmeña’s proposal for desalination is capital intensive, both the city and province should mobilize the support of water suppliers and their own resources to deliver water directly to both the farmers and the households.
Long term, we do need to consider desalination to help solve the province’s water supply problem. And we also need to build more rainwater catchments and storage tanks to augment our supply since we cannot rely on MCWD to do the job alone.
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