Sometime in 2001 at the start of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s nine years in Malacanang, somebody in the Department of Public Works and Highways had the bright idea of allocating funds for dredging.
Naturally, the barong-clad crocodiles at the House of Representatives readily agreed to insert dredging and desilting of rivers and creeks ostensibly to improve water flow and reduce flooding.
In the province of Catanduanes alone, the then unimaginable sum of P1.2 billion in public funds was allocated to dredge and desilt rivers and creeks, including some which had practically no water on it.
For a project that required so much money, the fact that it cost so much less to implement made it attractive to contractors and their congressmen backers.
According to a government engineer at the time, all the contractor needed to do was deploy a bulldozer at the river and have it push earth from the riverbed to the banks.
Nobody bothered to measure exactly how much earth was removed by the contractors as long as the river looked wider.
And the good thing was that even if the auditors flagged the project, flooding spawned by frequent typhoons soon buried the evidence.
The whole thing cost only less than 20 percent of the total project amount, leaving the contractor, the DPWH engineers, COA inspectors, and, of course, the honorable congressman with a lot more cash to divide among themselves.
The dredging spree during the Arroyo administration gave birth to a particularly well-known and controversial construction conglomerate that began its life as a small-time contractor of projects of the Catanduanes provincial government during the Verceles years.
What the dredging and desilting projects left behind was unseen but surely felt by those whose livelihood depended on the river.
Numerous research shows that dredging will affect a river’s composition, diversity and resiliency in a number of ways.
Its banks become prone to erosion after dredging is completer and this will cause further buildup of silt, worsening rather than improving problems with navigation and flooding.
The loss of soil disturbs the habitat of riverbank fauna and seriously impacts local fish populations.
Notably, in the wake of the massive dredging activities in 2001 and succeeding years, local residents of Catanduanes observed a considerable decline in the catch of “cabonbon,” a fish specie that typically ‘hides’ under a thin layer of sand underwater where they lay their eggs.
As one study pointed out, dredging has significant impacts on fish and amphibians especially during reproduction when fish are highly vulnerable to disturbance during this time.
As of last week, the DPWH’s Oplan Kontra Baha program listed only the Bato river as one of the waterways to be subjected to dredging and desilting this year, although the site does not indicate when it would be undertaken and how much volume needed to be dredged.
Like all infrastructure projects that is certain to have environmental impacts, perhaps the Department of Environment and Natural Resources should endeavor to conduct a study of dredging potential impacts along the island’s longest river, in partnership with the Catanduanes State University.
It should be stressed that no less than the Sangguniang Bayan of San Miguel town has passed an ordinance regulating the catching, processing and transport of the “5K2B” species – kabakab (wild frog), kasili (freshwater eel), kabonbon (native goby), karakul (freshwater snail), karimpi (freshwater crablets), balanak (freshwater mullet), and buyod (freshwater shrimp) – all of which could be affected by dredging activities.