THE CURRENT WATER SHORTAGE IS GOING to get worse. The P65-billion Laiban Dam project in Tanay, Rizal, upon which the Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS) depends for additional water source by 2015, has gone kaput. The MWSS has terminated its joint venture talks with San Miguel Bulk Water Co. Inc. (SMBWCI) to develop this new major source of water.

That leaves the government with no immediate project to address the water shortfall of 1,600 million liters per day by 2015. The Laiban Dam would have provided 1,900 million liters a day of raw water, ?enough to supply Metro Manila with enough water for the next 30 or 40 years,? according to the MWSS. With it gone, the metropolis faces a very thirsty future.

The MWSS? stopgap measure is to tap Laguna de Bay for 300 million liters of water a day. But that water is going to be expensive. Water from the lake will have to be pumped up to Metro Manila, the lake being lower than the surrounding areas, which means consumers will be charged not only for cleaning and treating the water so it becomes potable, but also for the electricity needed to pump up the water.

MWSS Administrator Diosdado Jose Allado made no mention at all of Wawa Dam in Rodriguez (formerly Montalban) just a few kilometers above La Mesa Dam. Wawa is brimming with water, much of which just flows over the spillway uselessly and is lost in the Marikina and Pasig Rivers and Manila Bay. Just put a pipe from Wawa to La Mesa and water will flow by gravity to the latter reservoir to augment Metro Manila?s water supply. A developer, San Lorenzo Ruiz Builders and Developers Group. Inc. (SLRB) has offered to do that at no cost to the government, but as you can see the MWSS and the National Water Resources Board (NWRB) pretend that SLRB and its proposal don?t exist.

For the last 16 years, SLRB has been following up its proposal, and this column has been writing about it during all that time, but the answer of the water agencies is silence. They won?t even say why they do not want to consider the proposal.

SLRB says Wawa Dam can deliver 80,000 cubic meters of water to Metro Manila within eight months, 900,000 cubic meters in one and a half years, and four years thereafter, 1,500,000 cubic meters of water, thus solving the annual water crisis there.

Think of it, the MWSS and NWRB will have that much additional water without spending a single peso, so it is difficult to understand why they do not grab the offer. Especially now that Laiban Dam has been dropped like a hot potato.

The MWSS says it is open to other proposals to tap Laiban Dam, but who has the P65 billion to construct it? The government does not want to give any guarantee to any loans that the builder would incur (the San Miguel proposal does not have any government guarantee), so it would be difficult to get another builder with as much resources as San Miguel.

Even if construction of Laiban Dam begins this minute, it would take at least five years to finish it. Which means we will have an acute water shortage for at least the next five years if there is no other source that can be tapped quickly. That other source is Wawa Dam. It can be tapped within eight months, which means that by next summer, there would no longer be any water shortage in Metro Manila.

There is something very strange here. SLRB possesses the water rights to Wawa. It has applied to tap 900,000 cubic meters or 10.4 cubic meters per second (CMS) out of its 18.13 CMS or 1,500,000 cubic meters per day original water application permit, but it was given the runaround.

Strangely, in 2003, MWSS Regulatory Board chair Nathaniel Santos gave Manila Water Company Inc. (MWCI) the authority to collect in advance P732 million from Metro Manila consumers for its alleged investment in Wawa despite the fact that it had no water permit. In short, we are already paying for the water of Wawa but which water is being denied us.

There?s more. Do you know that the water concessionaires are collecting sewerage fees from us (look at your water bill) although they do not provide any sewerage service at all? Isn?t this worse than the over-collections being attributed to Meralco?

Which brings me back to the original question I have been asking again and again and for which I have gotten no answer: Why doesn?t the NWRB grant SLRB its full water permit? Why doesn?t it explain why it pretends that Wawa Dam is not there brimming with water which can end the water woes of Metro Manila?

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New Agriculture Secretary Bernardo Fondevilla should look at the P110-million Dampigan-Hinolaso-Osmeña farm-to-market road in Dolores, Eastern Samar. Farmers of Dolores have been frantically pleading for the completion of this road and an irrigation project which will help unlock the rich agricultural resources of their poverty-stricken area. It is now more than two years behind the scheduled date of completion. The farmers are being denied a vital government service that they should have been enjoying beginning two years ago.

Surprisingly, the contractor FMR is the biggest and most dominant contractor of government infrastructure projects in Eastern Samar. The sane government policy is to blacklist contractors who are remiss in the implementation of projects awarded to them. But the Dolores contractor seems to be an exception to the rule. In the last three years, more than P100 million of taxpayers? money has been spent for the project, but its progress is mired in delays. Why?

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KAPIHAN NOTES: Kapihan sa Manila guest this Monday is Sen. Mar Roxas, LP vice presidential candidate.