Following the simultaneous river cleanup spearheaded by the City Government a few weeks ago, the Guadalupe River finally received its much-awaited resuscitation and was freed up from solid trash.
Tons of garbage was taken off from the stretch from Barangay Guadalupe up to Pasil as the City Government obliged its strong workforce, elected officials included, to go down the troubled river to pick up visible trash.
City Government employees that I talked to said that there is still much to be done because the activity only removed visible physical trash comprising mostly of plastic household waste.
Another employee confided that during the entire time that they were on the river bed for nearly four hours, he saw how the houses on both sides of the river disposed of their liquid waste directly into the river to include human and animal feces.
He lost count of the number of orange-colored PVC tubes protruding from the walls of houses that dumped dirty water.
There was even a herd of goats pastured on the surviving vegetation on the dry portion of the river bed, not to mention the pig pens hanging from rundown houses that dropped waste directly into the river.
The sad reality is that liquid waste is as devastating as the solid waste and what is unfortunate is that we have limited capacity to address the problem because one doesn’t simply scoop the dirty water with a ladle similar to what they did to solid waste.
The condition of our rivers is a manifestation that over time the government, local and national alike, failed to exercise regulatory and police powers over violators who may either be household or industrial.
But we could not yet blame Mayor Edgar Labella who, like all the administrations that came ahead, also expressed intention to clean up the river.
The good mayor has initially flexed some muscles to address the problem, despite being perceived to be meek and soft, a contrast against his outspoken and ill-tempered predecessor.
I did not expect this administration to focus first on the river cleanup because it is not ideal to antagonize communities that delivered the votes that propelled them to power. This is the same source of indifference that preoccupied the previous administrations from addressing the problem.
I am giving the new mayor the benefit of the doubt on his display of political muscles over the river problem, that he was not merely reacting to the 60-day deadline set by DILG to conduct housekeeping in their localities.
With a young lawyer, handpicked by the mayor, and a student of a foremost environmental activist, at the helm of the city environment office, I hope that environmental stewardship would be sustained owing to his youth and idealism. The new administration should start thinking of infrastructure that will address water contamination, identify contributors that, if not mitigated immediately, will cause a potable water crisis.
It is high time that the City Government should start thinking about the establishment of a sewerage system to treat wastewater before it would be dumped back into rivers. This task is enormous and ambitious, but it is not something that we can relegate to the background because if nature takes its course, we will be at the receiving end of its fury.