Once lahar-buried, Bacolor wants irrigation water

Burying the town’s past image as a receptacle of lahar avalanches after Mount Pinatubo’s eruptions in 1991, farmers of Bacolor have convinced the government that their fields are now arable again but need a renewed gush of irrigation water to sustain soil productivity.

The National Irrigation Administration (NIA) has agreed to restore its services to an initial batch of 262 farmers, including those with farms within the FVR Megadike, through a P96-million fund. It approved the Bacolor Communal Irrigation Project (BCIP) after more than 100 farmers testified to local officials and members of the Villa de Bacolor (Pampanga) Irrigators Association Inc. on Friday, the agency’s administrator, Antonio Nangel, said.

The farmers said they had relied on rains and a creek to irrigate their farms planted with rice, corn, mangoes, vegetables and sugarcane since 1997. These, they said, were grown on land buried by lahar that rains washed down from the slopes of Pinatubo and spilled from the Pasig-Potrero River since 1991.

NIA personnel had conducted field assessments and validation before Friday’s meeting, Nangel said. A creek in Barangay San Antonio fed by the Pasig-Potrero, he said, showed potentials of irrigating 566 hectares of land.

The BCIP would serve San Antonio (124 ha, 36 farmers), Sta. Barbara (160 ha, 79 farmers), Parulog (95 ha, 58 farmers), Cabetican (114 ha, 52 farmers), Tinajero (32 ha, 15 farmers), San Vicente (31 ha, 16 farmers) and Sta. Ines (10 ha, 6 farmers), said Reynaldo Puno, NIA Central Luzon manager.

It has a budget of P60 million for the remainder of 2011 and P36 million for 2012. Nangel said the funds would be used to build and improve a diversion dam connected to a series of canals and ditches, as well as support programs by the municipality and the Department of Agriculture.

Puno said the BCIP dam would be located in San Antonio, 7 kilometers from the town proper. The village is beside the transverse dike, which slows down the flow of lahar in the U-shaped FVR Megadike, Pampanga’s main defense against lahar. Nine of Bacolor’s 21 villages are inside the dike.

Bacolor had not experienced major lahar avalanches after 1995. That year, strong rains washed down volcanic sediments from the slopes of Pinatubo, filling the Pasig-Potrero, breaching minor dikes and spilling over to Barangay Cabalantian and other riverbank communities.

A no-man’s land in 1995, Bacolor has more than 10,000 residents back for good. Over 90,000 residents remain scattered in at least seven resettlement sites.