Benguet mine area eyed for Baguio’s water supply

PRECIOUS RESOURCE Baguio City’s high rainfall volume prompted the American colonial government in the early 1900s to build a rain basin on Mt. Santo Tomas, shown in this January photo, that the city still uses. Water in Baguio has been rationed as the summer capital deals with the impact of overpopulation and rapid urbanization. —NEIL CLARK ONGCHANGCO

BAGUIO CITY—The British Embassy is leading a feasibility study of the bulk water potentials in Benguet province so it can be tapped to supply Baguio, where water has been rationed for almost 50 years amid overpopulation and overdevelopment.

During its session this week, the city council received a copy of a memorandum of agreement for a “climate resilient integrated urban water resources management” program that was signed by the British Embassy, the Baguio Water District (BWD) and the office of Mayor Benjamin Magalong.

A bulk water program is “the only solution” that will ease the pressure of developing new drinking water sources around Baguio amid concerns about exhausting the city’s aquifer, Magalong said in an earlier year-end briefing.

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According to Magalong, a likely water source for a long-term supply project is in neighboring Itogon town, which hosts pioneer mines, including the country’s first, Benguet Corp.

The United Kingdom-funded study will help Baguio determine the most appropriate technology that is affordable for residents who will consume water channeled up from Benguet province, the mayor said, revealing that the principal infrastructure for such a project requires over 20 kilometers of pipeline and five stages of pumping water drawn from a river in Itogon.

City Administrator Bonifacio dela Peña, a geodetic engineer, had said the initial bulk water proposals might raise water rates from P40 per cubic meter to a high of P139 per cubic meter.

In 2005, a mining firm won a 25-year water supply contract put out by BWD but the deal was embroiled in litigation and had not materialized, records show.

BWD general manager Salvador Royeca had received unsolicited bulk water supply offers as far back as 2015 from Maynilad, PrimeWater Infrastructure Corp. and Manila Water. These proposals eyed the Badiwan water sources in nearby Tuba town, also in Benguet.

BWD has been constructing 10 deep wells each year to expand services for a population of 366,358 (per 2020 census), Magalong said.

According to a 2019 study, Baguio’s estimated carrying capacity for water had been breached in 2002. Ideally, Baguio’s population threshold for water is 267,546 people.

Rainfall

Baguio had also invested in rain harvesting projects, the mayor said.

A 2016 Water Security and Resiliency Study conducted by the University of the Philippines Baguio noted that Baguio’s high rainfall was a resource that needed to be tapped.

“Having a distinct May-October wet season, Baguio holds the country’s record for the highest annual rainfall (9006 millimeters), which it experienced in 1910,” it said.

The American colonial government built a 2-hectare rain basin at the Mount Santo Tomas reservation, which BWD has modernized and still utilizes today.

But bulk water remains the most efficient option for a major tourist destination like Baguio, where the daytime population shoots up to 700,000 people because of tourists, out-of-town businessmen and students who live in the surrounding towns, Magalong said.

The feasibility study may consider the soil and hydrological condition of waterways near mining tenements in Itogon, which were mapped out by British and Filipino scientists in the past three years, to help put up better regulations and establish the “river health” of these water systems.

Commissioned by the Sustainable Mineral Resources Programme, which is jointly financed by the Department of Science and Technology and the UK, the studies confirmed the presence of high mineral pollutants when the results were presented here on Nov. 18.

But there was also evidence that natural geothermal activities have also tainted sections of the Agno river system, which was a case study of the “first nationwide baseline survey of water quality and ecological health of major Philippine rivers.”

Hot springs

British researcher Patrick Byrne of the Liverpool John Moores University said: “Unexpectedly, geothermal inputs rather than mining are responsible for the most elevated aqueous trace metal concentrations in the Itogon catchment (also known as the Ambalanga water system), and many of these concentrations from natural and geothermal sources exceed [Philippine quality] standards.”

“Globally, mining activities can cause metal contamination of waters through direct discharge of effluents and waste and through the chemical interaction between water and the deposited mine waste or the leaching of mine waste,” he said.

“We wanted to test this hypothesis [that mining is the primary source of river pollution],” Byrne said, and studied the impact of hot springs and small-scale mine activities near the river.