Three mayors and a park

Alfonso Tabora, former and the last appointed Mayor of Baguio City, whose administration in 50’s would be remembered for its flagship program: the rebuilding and re-greening of the City of Pines that was then still reeling from the carpet bombing it received from the US Air Force during the liberation of the city from the Japanese, built wells in different parts of the city to provide the community with access to free, clean, potable water. One of those wells still serve the city to this day - Baguio Water District water delivery trucks could be seen every day drawing water from a pipe located somewhere off Burnham Park along Kisad Road.

“A water well is an excavation or structure created in the ground by digging, driving, boring, or drilling to access groundwater in underground aquifers,” Wikipedia tells us. That’s one of the amazing things about nature, it provides for systems that in turn provide us humans with what we need to survive. Water evaporates, goes way up in the sky, evaporates and returns to earth in the form of precipitation. Some of that water nourish those colourful blooms and magnificent trees that surround Burnham Park, and the rest, those same trees store underground but not too far down so those BWD trucks can continue to collect water easily from the area for delivery to your homes.

The rainwater that fall on the concrete streets around the park flow along the canals and into the sewers, or towards lower lying areas. If the amount of water falling from the sky is greater than the amount of water those canals and sewers can handle, then the water collects on the surface and we experience floods. But thanks to the natural wide open spaces in the area, much of the rainwater is kept off our streets and absorbed by the earth.

Pour concrete in an area that naturally absorbs water and you deprive the flora in the area of much needed life-giving water. We only have to look at what happened to the trees that were imprisoned inside concrete cages at the Baguio Botanical Garden, a.k.a. Centennial Park to know what’s going to happen. Within weeks after the construction of that concrete box at the park, those trees started dying. They’re all dead now.

Pour concrete on a significant part of the Melvin Jones Football Grounds that acts as an aquifer and we don’t have to be scientists or environment experts to know what may happen. Much of the water that may otherwise be absorbed and stored underground will now remain on the surface. Water stored during the rainy soon that those trees access during the dry season to live and sustain life will instead be wasted.

You suddenly deny the area of that much water, and you disturb the ecological balance of the area. Trees and plants dry out, and eventually die. To some of us, it could merely be one tree, but to the thousands, even millions of smaller beings, insects, bugs, worms, etc., a tree is their whole universe. One tree dies and millions of other life forms die with it. What happens when not just one but two, three or a dozen trees die? How about 182 trees? Do the math – a single tree absorbs an average of 48 lbs. of harmful carbon from the air yearly, and provide enough oxygen for two human beings. How about the fact that trees help reduce excessive water runoff that cause floods in lower lying areas and act as natural pollution filters that keep our rivers and other water sources clean?

In one conversation at the height of the campaign season for the 2010 elections, former Mayor Peter Rey Bautista said that while it’s true that the city’s garbage crisis is a serious problem that needed a long-lasting and sustainable solution, he wanted to focus on what he believed was the bigger crisis that this rapidly urbanizing city faced in the years to come: water. As more and more trees are mowed down, more and more natural open spaces are concreted over, we have less and less water to sustain an ever growing population.

So are we really willing to cede the Melvin Jones Football Grounds, that much earth space that absorb and store that much water and sustain the lives of that many trees so that we have somewhere to park our cars?

Our current Mayor, The Hon. Mauricio Domogan, said that it’s not a done deal yet, this proposed parking facility at the Melvin Jones Football Grounds, that it’s just an idea that’s being explored at the moment. That’s great news for really, I say hold on, dear ladies and gentlemen who like being called honorables, perhaps it’s wise to see how the concreting of much of the Rose Garden will do to the life around it, or if there’s more damage that the concrete building at the Botanical Garden will do on top of the death of a number of trees… before we bring out the backhoes and the cement mixers to destroy the natural balance of the area that has been sustaining life, helping keep us alive and safe from natural calamities, where many of us get some sun, breath unpolluted air, get our water from, where our children play today, where our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers before them played.