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ENVIRONMENT Secretary Lito Atienza has ordered the
proper department people to draw a comprehensive program
to connect all of Baguio City’s households to the city
sewage-treatment plant to protect the Balili River from
pollution that is steadily causing its degradation.
“I have
instructed heads of the DENR office for the Cordillera
Administrative Region to begin sitting down with the
water district officials, local government officials,
and concerned nongovernment organizations for the
drafting of the proposal.”
There
are an estimated 52,300 households in the city,
two-thirds of which are not connected to the sewerage
system.
He
expects whatever plan is developed would be evaluated
for possible funding by agencies now helping the DENR
implement its environmental projects, like the Asian
Development Bank and the World Bank.
“I don’t
want
Balili River to go the
way [of the] Pasig River due to urbanization and to be
added to the list of dead rivers. Not under my watch,”
Atienza said.
Atienza
said that like
Pasig River,
most, if not all, of the pollution load in
Balili River
comes from domestic wastewater directly discharging into
the river.
“Protecting Balili River becomes even more urgent as its
water quality directly affects the city’s water supply,
which is mostly sourced from deep wells,” he added.
According to Paquito Moreno, director of the DENR’s
Environmental Management Bureau-CAR, the river is a
source of water that feeds the city’s aquifers.
Baguio
water district office data show there were 498 wells as
of 1995, each with an extraction capacity of less than
30 liters per second.
“The
figures are definitely higher now considering that only
25 percent of the population, living in seven barangays,
are connected to the city’s main water pipeline,” said
Moreno, who added that more and more houses have been
converted into tourist facilities, which conceivably
added a lot to the problem.
In 2005,
about 637,000 tourist arrivals were recorded, generating
almost P4 billion in revenues. The city has 109 hotels,
inns and lodging houses with 4,687 rentable rooms.
A 2004
study showed the sewage-treatment plant covered only
about 19 percent of the city’s population and 40 percent
of these were mostly local industries and large
commercial establishments like SM, Camp John Hay and
Teachers Camp.
As a
result of the low sewerage coverage, residents of
downstream districts have experienced water-borne
diseases caused by pollution upstream.
Present
efforts to clean the river are concentrated on the
15-kilometer starting on the eastern side of
Baguio City
at the Gibraltar area, site of the Mines View Park, and
threading through the Teachers Camp, the city’s central
business district, and downward to La Trinidad Valley,
where the water is used to irrigate vegetable farms.
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