The spirit of EDSA is alive and well. That was very clear last Monday when tens of thousands of people lined the streets of Mandaluyong, Makati and Manila in an outpouring of love for President Corazon C. Aquino as her remains were taken from La Salle Green Hills to the Manila Cathedral on a flatbed truck smothered with yellow flowers. It was People Power all over again on EDSA (Epifanio delos Santos Avenue) and Ayala Avenue, scene of Cory’s greatest triumphs against tyranny and corruption.
I was on the way from Manila to Makati that afternoon when I got caught up in the traffic spawned by the slow procession. People from all walks of life lined the streets of Metro Manila, standing five deep on the sidewalks and the flower boxes on the center islands to get a glimpse of the flag-draped casket of their beloved “Tita Cory.” Students in school uniforms left their classrooms to watch Cory’s procession pass by, office workers leaned out of windows or stood on rooftops, children hung from the branches of trees, squatters wiped tears from their faces, yellow confetti rained down from the windows of high-rise buildings, drivers honked their horns, people flashed the L sign and chanted “Cory, Cory, Cory!”, housewives mumbled prayers as the truck bearing her casket passed by. It was People Power again.
I am supposed to be a hardboiled journalist, but I couldn’t stop the tears as I saw the love pouring out of the hearts of Filipinos for their Tita Cory. I have cried at processions like this only twice in my life: During the visit of the Pope in Manila decades ago and now Cory’s trip to the cathedral.
I am sure the same scenes will be repeated at today’s funeral for Cory. Any potential tyrant and dictator should remember these scenes. The people will rise again if their freedom is threatened again. The spirit of EDSA and of Cory is alive in the hearts and minds of each of them.
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I might as well finish the letter (started last July 31) of Oscar Violago, president of San Lorenzo Ruiz Builders and Developers Group, offering a cheaper and faster alternative to Laiban Dam. This is the Wawa Dam in Montalban, which Violago offered to revive, at no cost to the government, to add to the water supply of Metro Manila which is plagued by water shortages every summer. Wawa Dam used to be the main source of water for Manila until Angat Dam was built. Now water from Angat is no longer enough for Metro Manila’s needs.
Violago enumerated in his letter the advantages of Wawa over Laiban, the principal ones being that reharnessing Wawa would cost only a fraction of what it would cost to build Laiban Dam (which San Lorenzo would pay for) and Wawa would be productive after only eight months instead of the five years needed to finish Laiban. Here is the concluding part of Violago’s letter:
“We are advancing an offer which would redound greatly to the advantage of MWSS, MWCI and MWSI which we hope will be passed on as considerable savings in water bills to Metro Manila residents.
“* P16/cu.m. and P11/cu.m. for treated and untreated water, respectively. We can reduce our price of treated water for the 80 MLD (million liters daily) to just approximately P7 operational cost of MWCI under certain conditions.
“* Delivery dates of eight months for 50 MLD to 80 MLD, two years for 200 MLD and four to five years for 1,000 MLD to 1,500 MLD. TCGI, which is one of the six approved and accredited consultants of NWRB, recently certified that Wawa River watershed area can deliver more or less 1,500 million liters of water per day.
“In summary, SLRB’s Wawa Dam project is urgently needed by Metro Manila’s water consumers to solve their immediate water supply problem at the cheapest price. For national security reasons, it must be harnessed now. An oversupply of water, which was erroneously predicted by a former MWSS administrator in 1996 or 13 years ago, would be a problem that everybody will welcome with open arms.
“Lastly, SLRB invites the consultants, engineers and high officials of MWSS, MWSI, MWCI, MWSS Regulatory Board and NWRB to meet at the MWSS office, with the presence of media, to compare Laiban Dam, Laguna Lake, Kaliwa River, Agos River, and Kanan River versus the Wawa Dam in terms of pricing, delivery dates and solving Metro Manila’s water supply problems at the soonest possible time.”
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As I see it, both projects, Wawa and Laiban, can be built at the same time. They are complementary; they don’t have to be exclusive of each other. Anyway, both would be at no cost to the government. The water demands not only of Metro Manila but also of surrounding areas are so great, and will continue to grow that there will be no oversupply.
For example, several subdivisions in Parañaque and Las Piñas, still have no MWSS connections. The residents there buy water, at very high costs, trucked in by private contractors who get their supply from MWSS anyway. They have been begging for MWSS connections for years now. Subdivisions and factories continue to suck out massive amounts of underground water which results in ground subsidence and floods.
Angat Dam is supposed to be a multi-purpose project, but the farmers of Bulacan have been deprived of irrigation water and the dam’s power output was reduced to supply Metro Manila with more drinking water. And irony of ironies, Bulacan residents have no water connections in spite of the fact that Metro Manila’s water supply comes from Angat in Bulacan. Similarly, the towns of Montalban, San Mateo, Antipolo and other Rizal towns have no MWSS water connections although Wawa Dam is right there, full of water, millions of gallons of which go over the dam every day and flow out to the sea.
We need both projects.
