Friday, August 24, 2007 Speak out: Building gabions and check dams By Jose R. Gapas Chairman, SWCF Board of Trustees
WATER is life.
It is needed to support all life forms.
Plentiful water is needed for an accelerated development of Cebu. But its water supply is diminishing.
It is suffocating due to lack of water. It is dying as an ecosystem.
In the last 40 years, all river systems that cross through Cebu City---the Buhisan, Butuanon, Guadalupe and Labangon rivers---have dried up.
Water table has sunk from 70 feet to more than 500 feet.
Landward intrusion of seawater has increased from less than a kilometer to more than 4 kilometers.
Thus, the remaining rivers still with water will have dried up, the water table will have sunk to more than 1000 feet and the landward intrusion of seawater will have advanced to more than 8 kilometers from the shoreline in the next 40 years or by 2047.
This can be stopped and reversed.
God has been generous to us Cebuanos yearly. He supplies us with 1,700 mm of annual rainfall.
The problem is that we allowed the destruction and removal of the watersheds’ forest and vegetative cover.
These were God's mechanism and technology to harvest the rain, keep it in place to allow it to percolate to refill the aquifers and thus maintain the high levels of our water table.
So to solve our water problem, we follow the technology He initiated.
The mechanism and technology are series and properly constructed and spaced gabions and check dams in all water ways from the highest point of the watershed down to the lengths of the dried river beds.
These gabions and check dams will take the place of the forest originally placed by God to harvest the rain.
As soon as we can put in place these gabions and check dams in our protected and timberland areas and uplands, we can have water flowing in our dried up rivers again in 15 years.
A united effort is needed to succeed in this endeavor.
