Garbage removal underway; ending pollution will take time

THE Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) have started deploying amphibious excavators along the 1.5kilometer shoreline along Roxas Blvd. between the Manila Yacht Club and the United States Embassy.

At least 20 trucks will be used to transport the trash that the excavators are expected to raise from the waters close to the shore. There have been occasional cleanup drives conducted by civic groups that collected trash on the shores of the bay. This time, with the excavators, the DPWH and the DENR intend to reach farther out into the bay and remove the garbage dumped over so many decades..

The silt and garbage raised from the waters of the bay will go through a waste segregation machine and the trash will be taken to a Navotas landfill while the mire and soil will be dumped in Bicutan, Taguig City. This dredging operation may take three months. The goal is to remove all the garbage that now covers the sand at the bottom of the bay.

It must be stressed, however, that this excavation operation is only part of the rehabilitation plan for Manila Bay. The bigger part will be the elimination of the pollution that now flows into it with the waste water coming from the thousands of homes and establishments in Metro Manila. Because of all these untreated wastes, the fecal coliform bacterial level in many parts of the bay is said to have reached 350 MPN (Most Probable Number) per 100 milliliters, when the acceptable level is only 100 MPN.

At the start of the cleanup, the Manila Zoo, along with several hotels and restaurants, were closed down for directly dumping their wastewater into sewers flowing into the bay. Metro Manila’s two water concessionaires, which have been collecting funds from households to set up wastewater treatment plants, expect close to 100 percent coverage of their areas by about 2037.

And this is only Metro Manila with its Pasig River collecting waste water from heavily populated towns along the way as well as from Laguna de Bay with its own set of towns and five river systems that flow into it from Southern Luzon – the Boso-boso river in Rizal, the Zapote river in Cavite, the San Cristobal river in Laguna, the San Juan river in Batangas, and the Iyam-Dumacaa river in Quezon The DENR said hundreds of hog farms have long been disposing of their animal wastes into these rivers.

There are other river systems carrying their own pollution directly into Manila Bay from Bataan in the west, Pampanga and Bulacan in the north, and Cavite in the south.

All this pollution has made Manila Bay what it is today, a body of water unsafe for swimming or any other form of “contact recreation.”

The excavators deployed by the DPWH and DENR will remove the more visible garbage that now covers the sand along Roxas Boulevard. The real pollution is less visible – the bacteria thriving in the wastewater from Metro Manila and Laguna de Bay, that can cause disease upon contact.

We must not expect any quick solution to this long-neglected problem of Manila Bay. We can only be thankful that finally, the government is acting on it.