FROLICKING FILTER FUN! Beating the blues at old Balara

Whew! It’s summer time and everyone is trying to escape the heat. Few are contemplating escaping by means of private jet, what with the Philippine Air Force’s standing order to shoot down any such flights. (But with only two operating jet fighters, can they do the job? Do they even have enough fuel? …or enough ammo?…but I digress.)

Options of escape for ordinary folk like us, however, are limited. Malls provide some relief with air-conditioning, unless of course there’s a brownout and everyone starts to marinate in their own sweat. No, the perfect solution in an over-heated and tree-less city is to strip down as close as possible to your birthday suit and take a dip in the cool waters of a swimming pool, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

For those of us without a private "Boracay" pool, the choices narrow to the infested waters of Manila Bay or a public pool. There used to be a good number of these pools in Manila. There still is one operating in Sta. Ana but the algae-coloured water is as green as pea soup …and probably just as tasty (yucky-pooh!). There are of course the big and splashy new water parks, but these are expensive.

Taking A Dip In Diliman

In the 50s and 60s there was no question of where to go for that cheap dip in waterland …we all went to Balara! A trip in those days to Diliman and the Balara Filters was like a trip out into the country. The area was still probinsya and even the large buildings of the UP were dwarfed in the empty expanse that was Quezon City.

The Balara Filters was and still is a large facility of about 60 hectares. Aside from two huge filtration plants (Balara Filter 1 and Balara Filter 2) and administrative buildings, it has housing for employees. Here too, the government built a swimming complex that quickly became the summer Mecca for new suburbanites of Quezon City and the rest of the growing metropolis.

My memories of Balara are of the crowds and the hugeness of the pools. Everything seemed bigger when you were a kid. There were three pools, a large T-shaped main pool with a deep end for diving and two shallower kid’s pools. The pools were served by two structures containing dressing rooms and toilets and eating facilities. The main structure was "Malayan" in style and built at the start of the trend to adapt "native" silhouettes for Filipino architecture. (The original Max’s Chicken restaurant was in the same style and maybe designed by the same architect.)

The pools were in operation till the Seventies but I never returned to them except in my college days (the "drugstore" at the entrance to Balara was a favorite spot for us crazy college kids …it served the coldest beer on Katipunan!). I’d always thought Balara was worth a visit to see if there was any hope of reviving it for a metropolis starved for public amenity and open space.

Filter Fanfare

To find out more about the place, I sought out a friend from my Singapore days, Joel Lacsamana, now the dashing Corporate Communications honcho of Manila Water. Yes, Joel’s always dashing here and there, busy as he is making sure that the populace, in his company’s franchise area, is well serviced. Seriously though, the guy knows his water and was overflowing with information on Balara and the MWSS complex, where he holds office.

Joel narrates that the Balara filters were opened with fanfare in1953. The structures of the complex, Joel pointed out to me, were in beautiful art deco style similar to the Angat and Ipo Dam resthouse structures. (This must have been because the old Bureau of Public Works architects and engineers were still influenced by this pre-war style. The Quezon Memorial and the Quirino Grandstand are two other examples from this era.)

Out of curiosity I asked Joel just how much water is filtered here. Joel was a flood of information: "The two filtration plants now service exclusively the whole of the East Zone of Metro Manila’s needs – about 1700 million liters per day is generated from these two. That’s about 6.5 billion glasses of water each day. Water that comes from the Balara filtration plants are regularly checked and certified by the DOH."

Joel continued, "The water flow is from the mammoth Angat Dam way up in Norzagaray, Bulacan. Angat supplies 97 percent of Metro Manila’s needs. Every second, the dam releases 46 cubic meters of water – one minute’s worth of water from Angat can fill up two Olympic-sized swimming pools. It takes about four hours to travel from Angat to Ipo Dam, then finally to La Mesa Dam in Novaliches. The water produced from Balara travels via a maze of pipes thousands of kilometers long. Some of these pipes are big enough for a car to drive through. All in all, there are about 400 plus water connections all throughout the East Zone that receive water from these two filtration plants in Balara."

Water Sources

The origins of Manila’s water system are traced back to Don Francisco Carriedo’s ‘legacy.’ The wealthy Spaniard donated an ample sum of money for a water system to be built in Manila. True to form, it took the government a century from his death in the mid-1700s for the system to be built. The original source was the Marikina River (still the cleanest river in the area). The water was pumped to a reservoir, "El Deposito" in San Juan Del Monte. The system worked adequately enough until Manila grew outwards towards new Quezon City.

After the war the city grew even faster. Despite this and the sprouting of housing projects in the area, it was still liblib. NAWASA, as it was known then, needed to house its personnel within the facility. Then as now, Joel says, "…all employees and managers assigned in the two filtration plants live within the compound, a necessity since the plants and the huge pumping station that pushes the water to the East Zone run 24 hours a day. These men and women are on call 24 hours a day as well and have to be able to be at their post within minutes of any emergency."

The Balara village is an established community, an original settlement older than posh La Vista, with which it sits shoulder to shoulder. There is a school, market and church nearby. The streets are named for personages related to Manila’s water system like Carriedo and AD Williams (the chief engineer of the Bureau of Public Works in the pre-war years …he helped plan Quezon City).

Swimming Till The Seventies

In the Seventies, the Balara complex expanded with the building of the MWSS headquarters (by architect Gabriel Formoso). It was a sprawling and handsome modernist complex in the concrete brutalist style fashionable then. The architecture has stood well. It is also fairly well maintained. But the old surrounding lush landscape is now disappearing to informal settlements and a commercial shanty-strip mall that is an amazing study in micro-mixed use …on a two-meter wide strip of land you have everything here from sari-sari stores to bottled water and even karaoke joints.

The area’s majestic acacias and other large shade trees are also now in danger of road-widening proposals of the DPWH. Balara, like the University of the Philippines grounds, is in danger of losing its opens spaces, its greenery and its utility as a civic amenity.

Conservation is not limited to heritage buildings and old stone walls. Conservation and preservation aims to make sure that present and future citizens have access to parks, open spaces and leisure facilities. The Balara Filters’ swimming pools as well as the greenery that surround it needs to be conserved and made available to another generation of city residents.

Balara Blues

The plight of Balara reflects the appalling situation of a mega-metropolis without a comprehensive parks and recreation system. Malls are fine but they are, in the end, just private prisons to the vacuous culture of consumerism. (Okay so I begrudgingly visit them …for lack of options in the public realm ..and for the cafes and bookshops).

Speaking of options, in the early 19th century large private estates were converted to public gardens. These were the first urban parks. Maybe we should do the same with sequestered estates of fallen politicos. This plundered pool (no pun intended) of resources could well be thrown open to a sweltering public. We all paid for them anyway. We just have to be creative with our options. So, huwag na mag ‘erap sa enit!, Tayo na sa Balara o sa Boracay!

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Feedback is welcome. Please email the author at citysense@philstar.com For more information on Balara you can contact Joel Lacsamana at http://www.manilawateronline.com.