Saturday, April 21, 2007 Carvajal: So now the sea is dirty too By Orlando P. Carvajal Break Point
WE have written a lot about how dirty a city Cebu is.
This is not only this writer’s opinion. It is the observation of many. It is the perennial complaint of those who are active in the tourism industry. Remarkably, the source of the dirt or contamination is invariably human domestic waste.
We are not talking yet about dirt in the city’s underbelly which is the slums or what we locally call squatter areas. It is worse there of course because more than just pissing and spitting anywhere, there is defecating in places other than a sanitary toilet.
We are actually just talking of dirt in the city’s face like in the sidewalks of Fuente Osmeña. This is a high profile city location that you expect city officials to keep clean. Yet the fact is that the sidewalks (and skywalks for that matter) here are so dirty, reeking in places of urine that you wonder if our councilors or city health personnel ever walk through here.
Also, we have specifically highlighted in the past the extremely offensive foul smell of our dirty open drainage canals or esteros, the city not having an underground sewage system. Will it ever have one?
Here comes now the Environmental Management Bureau confirming the serious contamination of the seawater in the Mactan Channel making it unsafe for swimming and fishing. Again the principal contaminant is not industrial but human waste. More than the moral imperative to inform locals and visitors alike of this contamination is the bigger moral imperative to stop the contamination and prevent it at its source. It seems none of the sort is being done.
This is where the economic gains claimed by our top government officials really fly in their faces. The fact that the source of dirt and contamination of our cities is human domestic waste is an incontrovertible proof of the continuing poverty of many of our city dwellers whose pocket and educational attainment put a low priority on the construction of sanitary toilets.
The contamination by human domestic waste of our environment is incontrovertible proof of the low priority given by government to education, health, and housing in its social services. Yes, we have more money because of E-Vat. But where is all that money going to when there are still many poor and uneducated people without sanitary toilets, enough to seriously contaminate a whole channel.
It is election time but candidates are not telling us how we should measure their performance if we voted them in. I suggest we ask them to state their priorities and hold them to it. In the final analysis, we are to blame for all our social woes because we voted into office the leaders that are not doing anything about them.
