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By Patricia L. Adversario, Senior Reporter
First of two parts
A regional Trial Court recently granted Mayor
June V. Zapanta’s petition for a preliminary injunction that
prevents the Philippine National Police from impounding and
detai-ning garbage trucks from Taytay, Rizal.
Zapanta filed the injunction plea after the PNP
detained four garbage trucks owned by his Taytay municipal
government last Nov. 23 for alleged illegal dumping of garbage at
Lupang Arenda.
This is a victory for the mayor who sees the
detention of his town’s garbage trucks as a disruption of the
garbage disposal service for the people of Taytay. But that victory
has quashed efforts by the national govern-ment’s chief
environmental agency to promote the proper — and sanitary and
healthful — disposal of solid waste in Laguna de Bay.
The 90,000-hectare Laguna de Bay, the largest
lake in the country and an award-winner as one of the living lakes
in the world, is an important water source for Metro Manila. The
lake straddles urban and industrial centers in Laguna, Rizal, and
parts of Batangas, Cavite, and Quezon.
Lupang Arenda is part of a 171-hectare flood
plain located at Sitio Tapayan, Bgy. Sta. Ana, in Taytay. Portions
of the plain that lie at an elevation of only 12.5 meters and below
the normal water-level mark form part of the shore bed of the lake.
Faced with the court’s injunction order,
policemen are now at a loss what to do should garbage trucks from
Taytay resume dumping their load at Lupang Arenda. “If we do our
duty and detain them again,” said Col. Carlito Dimaano, PNP
provincial director of Rizal, “we might be held in contempt of
court.”
Yet the Solid Waste Management Act of 2002
(Republic Act 9003) prohibits open dumping, and burying of both
biodegradable and non-biodegradable materials in flood-prone areas.
The PNP, as a member of Task Force Lupang Arenda,
is duty bound to enforce the solid waste management law under a
special order signed by former Environment secretary Heherson T.
Alvarez. The court injunction now prohibits the PNP from
apprehending, impounding and detaining garbage trucks from Taytay.
The Department of Environment and Natural
Resources order dated last Oct. 21, authorizes the task force to
investigate violations of environmental laws and arrest even without
warrant, any person who has committed or is about to commit,
violations of these laws.
Col. Feliciano C. Dimayuga, who heads the PNP
contingent of Task Force Lupang Arenda, fears that “the injunction
could embolden other municipalities to dump garbage into the lake
with impunity. If we apprehend their trucks, they will likely seek
relief from the courts. How can we now dare stop other
municipalities along the shoreline that have been throwing garbage
directly or indirectly into the lake?”
“It’s really a very irregular situation,”
task force chair and DENR Undersecretary Manuel R. Sanchez told The
Times. “You have a government agency like the DENR that’s trying
to enforce environmental laws and prevent further pollution and
degradation of Laguna Lake — and we have a legal system that stops
us from preventing the violation of a law.
“This is a situation where government agencies
are not coordinated — and manipulated by some individuals. A local
official was able to prevail over national agencies because of a
temporary restraining order and injunction,” he lamented.
DENR lawyers will appeal the court decision.
They insist that since Lupang Arenda forms part of the lake’s bed,
there should be no dumping of garbage there. Whatever dumping is
being done now must be stopped. They think the injunction granted to
Taytay renders law enforcement inutile.
Environment officials hope they’re not too
late. While the law prohibits open dumping, thousands of urban poor
families have found a home on land that’s been built on garbage
dumped into the lakebed for years.
Sanchez said dumping at Lupang Arenda has been
going on since 1995 — and possibly even earlier.
Populist politics and government’s conflicting
policies allowed harmful garbage to be used to build Lupang Arenda
into the “garbage city” that it is now.
In 1995, former President Fidel V. Ramos
issued Presidential Proclamation 704 that reserved 80 hectares of
the flood plain for social housing development for the benefit of
“informal settlers” or — in blunt, less politically word,
language — squatters on the banks of the Pasig River and
Taytay’s poor families.
The Ramos proclamation ignored the
well-considered position of the Laguna Lake Development Authority
that the Lupang Arenda area is part of the Laguna de Bay shore land
and is “incapable of private appropriation” and subject only to
limited use.
How indeed can a flood plain that is normally
dry only four months in a year be declared a resettlement site?
The National Housing Authority owns the land.
NHA officials also do not think it is feasible to develop the area
as a resettlement site.
The NHA estimates that P1.5-billion worth of
backfill material would be required to prepare the flood-prone plain
for public housing. There is a proposed Laguna Lake Shore Dike. But,
says Tess Dungca, program manager of NHA South Luzon Bicol division,
that would cut across the plain and is likely to reduce the
resettlement site from 80 to 12 hectares.
“Until the dike is constructed, the NHA cannot
move into the area. We can’t plan without knowing how much land
the dike will take from the resettlement site,” said Dungca. The
dike also needs to be built first to make Lupang Arenda “dry
and habitable.”
While the NHA looked for another resettlement
site elsewhere, Ramos’ proclamation was luring droves of squatters
from all over Metro Manila to Lupang Arenda to stake their claims on
a patch of the shore bed.
From less than 300 families living on
stilt-borne houses in 1996, there are now at least 25,000 families
living on the flood plain. In six years, Lupang Arenda has been
transformed into largely dry land with newly painted, two-story
dwellings. There is now even a schoolhouse.
“Since NHA couldn’t provide the backfill
material, we used the garbage. We know the polluting effects of
using garbage — but we can’t afford to use soil except as cover
ground,” said Abel de las Alas, Lupang Arenda’s barangay
chairman.
“Garbage has given us normal our lives,” De
las Alas declared in Tagalog. “Because of garbage, we
don’t get flooded anymore, people are able to work, and our houses
are not destroyed. We used to get only four months of dry land in a
year. It’s now been two years since we’ve had floods.”
Right below where De las Alas holds office lie
tons and tons of raw garbage that had been poured into the lakebed
for years. Its soil overlay has neutralized the bad odor.
Bits of plastic protrude from the packed soil
that is now called Tapayan Ave., the main dirt road. Communities are
connected by smaller dirt roads raised slightly higher than the
shacks standing on their sides. Where residents used to move about
in bancas, there are now tricycles.
Several two-story concrete dwellings were being
constructed when The Manila Times visited there early this month.
Along the main dirt road, there were at least four well-stocked
hardware stores. De las Alas boasts of the new basketball court
where there used to be a swampy shore bed of garbage. Elsewhere,
mounds of garbage that still have to be pressed down, leveled and
then topped with soil float in putrid water.
Beside the garbage and on top of it, live the
residents of Lupang Arenda.
Edmond Marcelo, 42, a construction worker, lives
in one of the shacks on stilts. A two-story house is being
built near his shack. He used to rent a room with light and water
for P5,000. He now has his own shack and pays only P1,500 for
utilities.
Marcelo doesn’t seem to mind the garbage below
and in front of his house. In Tagalog, he said: “Where my house
stands now used to look like that mound of garbage. Eventually, that
will disappear — and there will be more houses like this.”
Conclusion
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