Where MWSS workers got the housing idea

In the children’s game Follow the Leader, the "it" at the head of a line moves about, doing whatever comes to mind. Others file behind and mimic the leader’s actions. Players who slip up or do not do what the leader does are out of the game, and the last child standing becomes the new leader.

Follow the Leader is what 1,411 waterworks workers are playing as they rush to erect homes inside La Mesa watershed. At the risk of spoiling the reservoir from which 14 million people draw water, they are only aping the antics of their heads. For, 54 managers of the Metropolitan Waterworks & Sewerage System already have built manors closer to the dam.

The KKK (Katarungan sa Kalikasan at Kinabukasan) that acts for the workers exposed the executive homes last week. Authorities had given an environment compliance certificate (ECC) for the 3.3-hectare enclave that includes a unit for MWSS administrator Orlando Honrade. The managers’ dwellings adjoin the water treatment plant within spitting distance of the reservoir, while the upcoming 58-hectare employee site is farther away.

A wrong does not right another wrong, though. The U.P. National Hydraulics Research Center found many faults with the employee housing within La Mesa’s fence fronting Quirino Highway. To begin with, it will fell 58 hectares of hardwood replanted by Bantay Kalikasan conservationists in 1999. This would ruin Metro Manila’s largest remaining tree cover against dirty air. Too the site is upstream from the dam, two kilometers by winding road but only one kilometer by straight path. Only if flowed into Amparo Village across the highway – that is, if residents consent – can flood drains and sewer pipes be prevented from polluting the reservoir. A third glitch is beyond solving. Heavy metal seepage from the housing would contaminate the dam within six months. The reservoir would need to be drained into a corner farthest from the home lots but only a fifth its size. With bulk of La Mesa’s stored water lost, the MWSS would have to fill tap demand from Angat Dam on which Central Luzon farmers rely for irrigation.

Blight from 1,411 homes would spread beyond the 14 million MWSS customers; it could reduce food supply from the Central Plains. So far thus the environment office is not about to give the employees an ECC. After all there’s substitute MWSS land twice the size in Antipolo City where Bantay Kalikasan vows to help build schools and basic utilities.

Employee insistence on La Mesa over Antipolo raises new questions. The 58 hectares is being sold at a giveaway of P5.50 per square meter – or 0.0003 percent of the P16,000 for a square meter along Quirino Highway. Still, if they accept the alternative site, the employees would get a heftier bargain of two lots for the price of one – or P2.25 per square meter. In rejecting it, critics ask, is the employees’ slip showing? Two labor unions had won the housing subsidy in 1968, but the original site got tied up in waterworks expansion and court cases. If still alive, are the "beneficiaries" induced by a sly land developer to stay on a highway for yet undisclosed reasons?

The original sin of executive housing needs review too. A treatment plant consists of deep and wide water ponds into which purifying chlorine is poured. Homes beside it expel kitchen and toilet waste, plus the dreaded heavy metals from paint, tin cans and plastic bags that could seep into the ponds and the adjacent reservoir. Rich executives generate the same trash that poor workers do. They can be as careless to mar the reservoir and the surrounding forest. The special housing is undeserved. Like waterworks employees, the managers’ first duty is to safeguard the reservoir and its watershed. Living – and thus entertaining visitors – beside the treatment plant and the reservoir exposes the area to terrorist attack.

Again, this would reduce Greater Manila’s water supply, and force the MWSS to pump reserves from Angat Dam. Like the planned 58-hectare employee housing, the existing 3.3-hectare executive homes pose a danger far wider than the MWSS area of jurisdiction. So the Save La Mesa coalition that Bantay Kalikasan formed is questioning the executive manors. On what grounds, for instance, was an ECC given?

The KKK meanwhile rants that Bantay Kalikasan itself is operating an Ecology Park right beside the dam but without an ECC. As any visitor would notice, the Park sits at the bottom of a cliff downstream from the reservoir, straddling the spillway onto Tullahan River. It has been there for two generations, revived only recently with aid from Quezon City Hall, six legislators and 30 private firms. For token entry fees, picnickers can enjoy orchid and cactus gardens, a forest trail of century-old trees, fishing and boating lagoons. The first waterworks managers and employees built the Park to showcase the forest in the city and the dam engineering. How it reopened with no ECC as newly required by law is another question. Still, many fond memories of school outings spring from the Park. It was where we as children used to play Follow the Leader, long before it became a dangerous game of adults.

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Development need not be destructive. Tandang Sora Road, in front of the MWSS headquarters in Diliman, Quezon City, can be widened without having to cut down the century-old trees on both sides. The two-lane road is too narrow a feeder between eight-lane Katipunan Avenue and 16-lane Commonwealth Avenue. Too much fossil fuel is burned each day from traffic chokes. The MWSS and U.P. can give up strips of land for Tandang Sora’s expansion, with the saved trees ending up on wide road medians.

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