MANILA, Philippines ? With the extremely heavy rains it spawned which triggered the worst flooding in Metro Manila and its environs recently, tropical storm ?Ondoy? appears to have succeeded where many governments have failed: In telling the people what the waterways are for.

It might have swept away entire villages, but Ondoy?s great flood is reviving hope that this generation which saw nature?s wrath last month will also be able to see its beauty.

?Because of Ondoy, people who live [along the Pasig River] now know that it is dangerous to live there,? Kapit Bisig Para sa Ilog Pasig (KBPIP) president Gina Lopez said.

Students, teachers involved

Lopez spoke during Friday?s launch of KBPIP?s partnership with the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) to involve college students and teachers in the seven-year makeover of the Pasig River.

Started in February, the KBPIP aims to rehabilitate the Pasig by first relocating thousands of illegal settlers clogging the length of its 27 kilometers and that of its 48 tributaries.

Three months before Ondoy struck, KBPIP managed to relocate some 300 families living along a creek in Paco, Manila.

?In a sense, we managed to save them from Ondoy. The families were telling me they couldn?t imagine what would have happened if they had stayed in their shanties,? said KBPIP project director Carminia Aragon.

Thousands more

Ondoy also washed away lingering doubts among the families who had been hesitant to relocate, Aragon said.

KBPIP plans to relocate 10,000 more families living along tributaries of Pasig. It also hopes to relocate some 100,000 families living along the Manggahan Floodway in Pasig City.

Supported by donations from private businesses and by the National Housing Authority (NHA), KBPIP, which is under the ABS-CBN Foundation, maintains a relocation site in Calauan, Laguna, called ?Bayanijuan.? Families are provided not only houses but livelihood training.

Ondoy killed about 500 people, damaged P11.21 billion worth of crops and infrastructure, and wrecked nearly 154,000 houses, the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) said.

In a presentation to officials of colleges and universities in Metro Manila and nearby regions, Lopez lamented the state of the Pasig and its tributaries which had been functioning as Metro Manila?s septic tank.

In Manila, for instance, the water that flows into the Estero de Paco comes from a tenement, Lopez said. Shanties along the creek do not have toilets.

High coliform levels

It was not surprising that the creek?s water contained 1.6 million mpn of coliform, an indicator of human-waste contamination, when the acceptable level of coliform for fish to survive is only 5,000 mpn, Lopez said. The San Juan River is worse: It has 1.5 billion mpn of coliform.

KBPIP aims to finish cleaning the Estero de Paco this year. The San Juan River and Marikina River, which both feed into the Pasig, are next.

The project?s ultimate goal is to return to the Pasig its lost glory when the water was so clean people actually swam in it. KBIP hopes to do this by 2015.

Aside from relocating illegal settlers, KBPIP aims to sustain the gains it would make by changing people?s mindsets and making them care more about the environment, Aragon said.

She said: ?Our vision is that all of us will realize the importance of our rivers and the importance of keeping them clean. We want a shift in the way we treat our environment.?

In school program

In an interview after the program, CHEd Chair Emmanuel Angeles promised to integrate the Pasig River cleanup in the National Service Training Program administered by colleges and universities.

KBPIP also said colleges and universities could join its youth program by implementing solid waste management on their campuses as well as encouraging their students to join the ?Philippine International Marathon: A Run for the Pasig River? set for November 8.

Involving the youth is a tested formula, Lopez said, pointing to the success of the signature campaign for the ?Save the La Mesa Watershed Project? where three million of the five million signatories were from the youth sector.

This time, she is hoping for a bigger participation, considering that the challenge of reviving the Pasig River is a difficult, but doable, task.