BAGUIO CITY—Baguio City is celebrating its 102nd Foundation Day on Thursday, but it may be an event haunted by the stench of garbage.
Every rainy season, when sections of the summer capital are flooded, public blame always falls on uncollected garbage and undisciplined residents.
After Aug. 27, however, it will be the faces of Noemi Cael, 21, and her brother, Jefonie, 19, that will hound the city.
The siblings died on Saturday, along with three of their neighbors belonging to the Flores family, when a section of a decommissioned dump was washed out by heavy rains, and buried their houses on Asin Road in Tuba, Benguet.
Their mother, Josephine, said residents could treat her children’s deaths as lessons.
“If only [the city’s] waste segregation [program] was effectively implemented, my children would still be here. Just by looking at that mountain of trash [in Barangay Irisan], we knew that [the program failed] … The [dump was piled high with garbage that was shaped] like a pyramid—the highest I have ever seen. It was a pyramid of biodegradable wastes, plastics and bottles,” Josephine said.
Same sentiment
It is the same sentiment aired by residents and officials of Asin and Irisan, who met Baguio officials on Monday to determine who was accountable for the slide.
They were suspicious of reports that the dump had been inactive since 2008, the year the residents barricaded the area to force the government to shut it down because it was on the verge of collapse.
Their fears proved true. Since Sunday, dump trucks have been hauling trash that blocked Km 5 along Asin Road. The dump continues to erode due to heavy rains since Saturday.
On Tuesday, Mayor Amadeo Perez IV of Urdaneta City in Pangasinan agreed to help by taking in garbage from Baguio for a fee of P2,500 for each ton of trash. Urdaneta operates its own environmental sanitary landfill.
An Asin resident said their neighborhood could plead with leaders of Baguio’s 128 barangays to enforce waste segregation so the dump would “no longer grow bigger.” Others said the city should start moving the mountain of trash elsewhere, “even Burnham Lake.”
Their doubts have cast a wide net over Baguio residents, too. Tuesday was garbage collection day for Mirador Subdivision, but residents who brought out their trash bags acknowledged some guilt “because we don’t know if the trash is going to the right place now.”
Moving a mountain
The reality which government employees dealt with each day after 2008 was that “the mountain of trash could not be moved,” said Cordelia Lacsamana, city environment officer.
The community action that closed the dump in 2008 had caught the government off guard, and Baguio was soon engulfed by a garbage crisis.
Uncollected trash littered the streets for months until the city government resolved to spend up to P200 million to move out garbage daily to a commercial landfill in Tarlac from 2008 to early 2010.
In the meantime, city efforts were divided between courting neighboring Benguet towns to approve the construction of an environmental sanitary landfill and pursuing a four-year closure plan supervised by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to decommission the dump and to convert it into a garden.
In the middle of 2010, Baguio officials decided to equip the City Environment and Parks Management Office with two Japan-made composting machines. Microbes, sealed in thermal tanks of the Environmental Recycling System (ERS) machines, convert sewage and organic wastes into powdered fertilizer.
The ERS machines were installed in the dump and have been operating for six months. The machines generated 226,800 kilograms of fertilizer as of July, and have apparently ended the garbage crisis that had put Baguio in a bad light, Lacsamana said.
Scant attention
People paid scant attention to the dump itself as the city’s solid waste management system improved.
Lacsamana said the city government spent P66 million to terrace the mountain of trash, forming a giant wall of compacted garbage and an eight-meter high reinforcing concrete barrier near its base.
Paquito Moreno, Cordillera director of the Environmental Management Bureau (EMB), said his office gave this instruction to the city: “As part of the drainage system, trench drains for [the] terraces and base drains, including weep holes, should be channeled into a main drainage canal system to prevent the accumulation of leachate [and cause the] saturation of the waste and possible erosion and instability [of the Irisan dump].”
Moreno told the Inquirer that the EMB needed to assess if the city followed its recommendations.
Lacsamana said city personnel continued to fill in the wall with residual garbage to ensure its stability, expecting to fulfill the closure plan by 2012.
But the government failed to resolve social issues necessary to complete the closure of the dump. It had to deal with a community of scavengers which earn a living from the dump, Lacsamana said.
She said some of these people have volunteered to join garbage trucks on their collection routes, helping out in exchange for recyclable materials.
The government had already eyed the transfer of 10 households near the rehabilitated dump, but convincing them to leave required diplomacy, she added.
Some of the properties surrounding the dump are multistory structures. A few have been sold over time to new owners.
The Cael family, for example, is based in Barlig, Mt. Province. They bought their house below the dump in 1996. Noemi and Jefonie Leon lived in that house for years while she pursued a nursing degree and her brother took up a computer course.
Josephine said her family was always fearful about the mountain of trash looming overhead and had participated in the effort to close the dump.
“We became calmer when the government finally decided to close the dump … That ran for three years, and we felt relieved. There was not much odor and there were no mosquitoes. Those were the years when we felt safest,” she said.
Then their world fell apart on Saturday.
Amid strong rains and a flooded Naguilian Road, people reported seeing streams of water shoot up from the concrete foundations of the dump at noon, Lacsamana said.
Then the barrier burst and mounds of trash rolled down the mountainside toward Asin Road.
Moreno said an EMB inspection on July 28 showed that the city government had completed the facility’s spillway, and the canals and litter fence set atop the reinforcement wall bore “no indication of defects as observed from the wall’s plastered surface.”
Building a dam
Asin villagers have urged Domogan to consider building a dam instead to hold the trash, but city engineer Leo Bernardez said such an undertaking would force the government to relocate houses in order to acquire more space.
Lacsamana said a technology used on mine tailings dams may be studied to ensure that the garbage heap won’t harm residents.
“In the past, [Noemi and Jefonie] would move out of the house temporarily and stay with relatives because it would be dangerous for them to stay in the house. They were not able to leave the house in time last week,” their father, Leon, said.
The Cael couple had to hike through landslides along the Halsema Highway to Baguio to claim their children’s remains.
Leon said he won’t be rebuilding their house. “I don’t think we would go back to that place,” he said.