Why We Don't Need More Water Dams

The irony of it all is that we've been surrounded by water since God created the Philippine islands thousands of years ago. Yet to this day water supply has been our perennial problem. Worse is, up to now we still rely on the rain. [Photo by Karl Paul Baldacchino on Unsplash].

Our water managers still blame the dry season for the drought and I've been hearing that excuse since I was in grade 3--and I now have a grandson. And they still think water dams are the answer. So they stubbornly build them, borrow big money from other countries, displace lots of mountain people in the process, lose money from corruption (big projects always come with it) and then wait for the rains to come.

Now when the rains don't come, water supply still becomes a problem even with the existing water dams. So there's a crisis, especially every summer time. EVERY SUMMER TIME. Sometimes the crisis carries on till even the wet season, like last year, 2019. It was the middle of the wet season and yet a lot of people in the Metro were suffering from severe lack of water.

No less than President Duterte had to threaten the water managers to release water, or else.

Again, what solution do they have in mind? Build dams.

I don't think they realize the real problem. Our problem, really, is rain. Every year, we do not have enough rains to fill the dams. Even if we have one billion dams, if there is not enough rain, we still have severe water lack. Even if we seed all the clouds in the sky everyday and create artificial clouds. The problem with cloud seeding is, it seldom hits the dams. Clouds move.

WHAT WE NEED IS TO TURN SEAWATER INTO POTABLE WATER. That's the answer God has been providing but we simply refuse to see it. Dry or wet season--even during drought--seawater is there, plenty of it. What we need to invest in is desalination, not more dams. Yeah it's too costly, but so are dams--especially when people living in the proposed dam sites are displaced.

Last I heard, they're trying to use Laguna Lake for this--and it's a good start--but they should look beyond. There's the Pacific Ocean on the east and Philippine Sea on the west. What we should be building are water channels from the sea to desalination stations and then to city water systems. This and the dams that rely on the rain will end the water crisis.

For countries that use desalination. Click here.

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