Cebu’s aquifers running on empty

CEBU CITY—Cebu City’s narrow aquifers, which supply water for a metro area of 12 cities and towns, are now “running on empty.”

Relentless overpumping of these narrow underground reservoirs allowed seawater to seep in, but salt contamination in the mid-1970s was contained along the seafront areas.

Today, the “saline edge” has crept more than 4 km inland, wrecking irreversibly the main source of  water.

“Your children will never drink from those aquifers again, unless you seal off salt intrusion—now,” Fr. Herman Van Engelen of the Water Resources Center (WRC) warned City Hall. “Now” was 1975.

With Filipino scientists at University of  San Carlos, this hydrologist tracked that saline edge’s advance for over four decades. Just 50 liters of seawater can render 1,000 liters of freshwater brackish, the WRC  repeatedly warned. It’d take three centuries to flush out the salt.

Van Engelen is now 84. The Society of Divine Word transferred him in July to an SVD retirement home in Holland. But his early fears have come true.

Saline edge

The WRC first mapped the salt intrusion in 1976. The saline edge then remained below Barangay Pardo to the south. It snaked through Barangay Labangon, but skirted landmark Fuente Osmeña. To the north, it slumped along reclamation areas by the shoreline in Mandaue City. (See map.)

Today, Cebu pumps double what overdrawn aquifers can recharge. Births and migrants, meanwhile, have jacked up demand on the Metro Cebu Water District, which serves only half the city’s households. More wells spew brackish water.

To keep faucets flowing, the MCWD’s 166-plus wells “mine” the aquifers. So do an estimated 19,000 private pumps. But encroachments into Cebu watersheds persist. The law on conserving rainwater (Republic Act No. 6716 ) has been totally ignored. Concrete and garbage block the recharge by rain.

“We have no water problem,” scoffed Cebu City south district Rep. Tomas Osmeña, who had served for three terms as mayor. Amen, chorused a stamp-pad  city council.

“This is a leadership in denial … by a harem  of eunuchs,” the Cebu Daily News said. “But delusion doesn’t alter reality.”

The stark reality is a “water policy  blackhole.”

City Hall didn’t tap surface water from beyond city limits. As a result, water tables have plunged. All the city’s rivers are biological latrines that discharge into an economically vital sea lane: Mactan Channel.

In a treeless city, summers compel “ad hoc measures” from City Hall, dispatching water tankers to mountain barangays.

The saline edge ignores political diktat. It has swept beyond the ancient Pardo church to foothills. It passed  Fuente Osmeña, and now inches towards the Provincial Capitol. Northward, the salt advance has gone beyond  Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino.

It taints pumps near Camp Lapu-Lapu in Barangay Apas. The deepest intrusions are north of Mandaue.

In mid-1990, “sustainable capacity of aquifers in Cebu City exceeded 3.6 times and in Mandaue, 7.4 times,” an Ayala Land study found.

If no reforms are adopted, Cebu’s groundwater will turn undrinkable. “It would no longer be a question of supply but include the politically volatile issue of quality.”

There is no substitute for water. When taps run dry, death rates bolt.

Worldwide, the Philippines has the second largest number of children who die from diarrhea. It is obscene “if people can not drink water without courting disease or death,” author Sandra Postel writes.

There is a surfeit of stark examples. Yemen pumps aquifers beyond rate of recharge. In its  capital Sana’a, tap water trickles once every four days. Just beyond India’s Taj Mahal smolder the ruins of Fatihpurshkari. The city died when its cisterns ran dry.

Saudi Arabia has pumped its fossil (nonreplenishible) aquifers dry, Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute notes. Riyadh will harvest this year its last wheat crop. Starting  2012, some 30 million Saudis—the equivalent of Canada—will totally depend on imported grain, swapped for oil.

How did this “Queen City of the South” blunder into such a  mess?

Congressman Osmeña’s regime offers the classic formula for water bankruptcy.

From Day One in City Hall, Osmeña scoffed at studies of looming water shortages from Delft University to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank. He sneered at the WRC reports.

Denial does not craft corrective measures. These would include stopping salt intrusion by recharging zones, reducing pumping in near shore areas to protecting aquifers in rivers and valleys.

Conservation measures, like rehabilitating Cebu’s denuded watersheds, rainwater collection systems and subdivision water impounding  measures, offer a twin track.

The World Bank, Ayala and major firms drafted a proposal to tap surface water outside of the city. Osmeña torpedoed that.

In a July 2005 meeting at Rotterdam, Osmeña demanded control of a Dutch government-funded project to develop a water master plan for Cebu. The Hague slapped the idea down decisively.

In response, Osmeña shelved a 30-year water master plan developed by Dutch and Filipino scientists. Instead, he hired an 80-year-old “water diviner” Soledad Legaspi to locate wells, including in water-short South Road Properties.

Water stress

Despite “Lola Choleng,” total availability of water, per person per year in the Philippines slumped below 1,700 cubic meters, the ADB warned. That’s the global threshold for water stress.

There’s no relief  in sight, says the 2011 report on “State of the Oceans.”

“We’re seeing changes that include melting of northern glaciers and sea level rise we didn’t expect to see for hundreds of years,” writes co-author Alex Rogers of Oxford University.

In Cebu, higher sea levels threaten to swamp low lying areas, beachfront resorts, ancient churches to even  the runways of Mactan International Airport. That’d see the saline edge advance even further.

Those who play deaf and dumb will be dead when  Cebu’s last  aquifers crumble. But the  grandchildren will be  around. They may spit on our graves.