Antonio C. Abaya - ParaÃ±aque Spillway Tunnel

The deluge from Tropical Storm Ondoy that sank a reported 80 percent of Metro Manila and continues to keep underwater most of the lakeshore towns around Laguna de Bay, has spurred a search for a solution to what promises to become a yearly urban nightmare.

Some of the solutions proffered border on the ridiculous. Gil Santos, president of the Philippine Center for Futuristics Studies, tells me of one that proposes to build a concrete wall around the entire lake, which will serve as both an anti-flooding dike and a perimeter highway and "a tourist attraction." Allegedly endorsed by President Cory Aquino.

The lake would then be drained of its water, its bottom scraped and cleaned â€“ like a giant wok? - and the aquifer beneath tapped to release fresh water.

Such a monstrosity would take at least five years to build. The proponent did not say how the lake's thousands of fishermen would be able to access the lake for their livelihood after that Berlin Wall is built. If there will be gaps for the passage of fishermen, then the seasonal rainwaters would rush down through these gaps in search of the lowest point, the lake, and would likely demolish major segments of the Wall.

The lake would never be drained of its dirty water and the proponent would be spending billions of pesos in taxpayers' money patching up the demolished segments of the Wall, like a modern Sisyphus pushing up a mountain a huge boulder that keeps rolling down.

The proponent also does not tell us where the waters from the Marikina, San Mateo, Umiray, etc rivers are supposed to flow, or what 15 million residents of Metro Manila and lakeshore towns will use for drinking water, while Sisyphus is trying to drain and clean the lake.

Laguna de Bay could end up an immense ecological disaster, like the Aral Sea in Central Asia after the Soviets diverted the rivers flowing into it to irrigate the cotton fields of Uzbekistan (or was it Kazakhstan?) in the 1980s.

Comes now a proposal to build a two-level tunnel that will drain off excess water from Laguna de Bay into Manila Bay, to prevent the flooding of lakeshore towns. Two-level because the upper level would be for motor vehicles, three lanes going westward towards Manila Bay, three lanes for vehicles going eastward towards Laguna de Bay. (Manila Standard Today, October 19,2009).

The bottom level would be the drainage canal for excess water in Laguna de Bay to flow out through to Manila Bay.

So this is a huge tunnel, as big as, or even bigger than, the Cross Harbour Tunnel in Hong Kong, or the Channel Tunnel between France and England. Does it make any sense? My answer is: No.

The proponent, one Daniel Bautista, identified as operations chief of a company called Northbay Constructions Services Inc., says that his project was first presented in the mid- 1980s when his father was consultant to the DPWH under then Min. Jesus Hipolito. He calls the project Storm Weather Management and Road Tunnel, or SMART. (What ever happened to the `W', I wonder.)

But I wouldn't call it smart. The project aims to build its tunnel under Sucat Road which will presumably start near the Meralco Sucat Plant and presumably connect with the ParaÃ±aque River near the ParaÃ±aque Church in Barrio La Huerta, the diverted flood waters emptying into Manila Bay near the Chinese temple on the Coastal Road.

I am familiar with the starting point of this tunnel, near the Meralco Sucat plant. This is in Barrio Buli. In the 1980s I operated a 20-hectare fish pen there, almost directly in front of the Meralco Sucat plant.

This point is about 50 meters lower than the surface of Sucat Road. It is neither safe nor feasible to dig a trench or gorge this deep in such a heavily built-up and heavily populated area. The disruption to traffic flow and commerce would be catastrophic. Bautista would have to use a tunnel-boring machine to dig a horizontal hole into which to insert his concrete- or steel-skinned tunnel tube.

The residents of nearby Posadas Village would certainly object to a tunnel being bored underneath or close to their subdivision. So would business and building owners along the length of Sucat Road. They would certainly question the wisdom of building a tunnel under their buildings that could conceivably weaken their buildings' foundations.

And all for what? To drain excess water from Laguna de Bay into a Manila Bay that is already heavily silted, heavily polluted and heavily laden with garbage and plastic bags

The idea of a ParaÃ±aque Spillway was recently resurrected by my friend Architect Jun Palafox, who referred to a 1977 World Bank report on urban planning in Metro Manila that specifically called for such an infra project to prevent the overflowing of Laguna de Bay.

Ado Paglinawan, who was in the Marcos government in the 1970s, wrote in two recent articles that the ParaÃ±aque Spillway was actually programmed by the Marcos government as early as 1974, and P62 million was set aside for its construction as early as 1986, under Presidential Decree no. 475.

But after Marcos was overthrown in February 1986, the incoming Cory Aquino revolutionary government junked the spillway project, but â€“ as in the Bataan nuclear power plant â€“ built or endorsed nothing to take its place. Cory just did not want to continue anything that the hated Marcoses had started.

In reply to a request from Rey Romasanta, an urban planning graduate student at UP Diliman, who asked me to critique his proposal for solving the flooding of Laguna de Bay, I wrote that the best place to locate the desired spillway would be at the eastern end of the lake, near Famy or Siniloan, in Laguna.

(Romasanta's proposal appears in full under "Reactions to `Mitigating Disasters'", archived in www.tapatt.net and acabaya.blogspot.com, together with my short critique.)

The area around Famy and Siniloan is largely forested and agricultural. If there is any need to expropriate land and/or to tunnel under built-up areas, it could be done at a much lower cost there than in ParaÃ±aque.

And although the strip of land between the lake and the Pacific Ocean is longer than the strip of land between the lake and Manila Bay, a spillway around Famy or Siniloan does not have to extend all the way to the ocean. It can end on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Madre, as long as the exit point is several meters lower than the entry point. The discharged water can then meander its way to the ocean, or a channel can be blasted and bulldozed for it through the foothills.

The discharged water can be tapped to turn the turbines of two or three mini-hydros on the way down, thus generating some 6 to 12 mw of electricity for local communities. And the discharged water does not have to flow uselessly into the ocean. It can be caught in a catchment basin that can be developed for fisheries, tourism and human habitation.

The spillway in Famy or Siniloan can thus be the catalyst for the development of the eastern seaboard of Luzon, from Mauban to Infanta to Baler to Casiguran, and all its vast potentials for forestry, fisheries, mining, upland agriculture, jatropha plantations, tourism and even a major port on the Pacific Ocean, which will decongest the overcrowded National Capital Region and the equally overcrowded Lingayen-Lucena Corridor.

No government of these islands, from the time of the Aetas, has ever seen fit to make changes like this and develop this neglected side of Luzon. Time to think outside the box, with a spillway at Famy or Siniloan, and an over-all land-use plan by, who else, Jun Palafox. Has any of the presidential candidates thought of this?

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