Water Impoundment in San Roque 
Reservoir to Submerge 8 Villages

Cause-oriented groups based in the Cordillera region called on the government to abort the water impoundment in the San Roque reservoir since this will only aggravate the already unrewarding toil of the residents.  

By BULATLAT.COM

San Roque, Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) --- Cause-oriented groups fear that eight small villages will be severely flooded within the next few months as a result of the impounding of water in the San Roque reservoir which began last August 8.

In a statement, the Shalupirip Santahnay Indigenous People’s Movement, Itogon Inter-Barangay Alliance, Tignay dagiti Mannalon a Mangwayawaya iti Agno (Peasant Movement to Free the Agno), Alyánsa dagiti Pesánte iti Taëng-Kordilyéra (Alliance of Peasants in the Cordillera Homeland) and the Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance (CPA) stressed that beyond the eight villages, “many others…will be victimized by siltation and upstream flooding…(depending) on the incidence and volume of erosion and dam-sediment spillage in the Agno river system.”

The organizations denounced the “treachery” of the national government and the National Power Corporation (NPC) for allowing the impoundment at this point, when the issues of displacement and livelihood alternatives for gold panners operating in the San Roque reservoir area have not been resolved.

They explained that in a dialog with government officials last June, both the national government and the NPC promised to defer the impoundment until these issues were satisfactorily addressed.

The San Roque Power Corporation (SRPC), according to the organization’s statement, “stands to (earn) more than a billion dollars within the first twelve years that it will operate the San Roque dam and power plant…(I)t will be paid about $16 million (monthly) for generating…30.5 to 54.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity, and nine million dollars for each month that it (does not produce) electricity because of low rates of water flow along the Agno (river) .”

The SRPC’s power production should have been put on hold, argued the organizations. “The national government’s present leadership has itself found the SRPC’s contract as an independent power producer to be fraught with financial and legal issues.”

“The national government should prevent the dislocation of additional people by getting reservoir impoundment aborted.  It should prevent the exploitation of electricity consumers and tax payers by working for a nullification, rather than a renegotiation, of the SRPC’s power production contract,” they added.

After all, they argued, “many of the issues that have been raised in connection with this project are issues beyond resolution. Because of their massiveness, the dam and its reservoir could not have been installed without dislocating nearly a thousand people. (They) cannot be commissioned without inducing increased siltation and upstream flooding along the Agno, and setting off a process that will result in the displacement of many thousands more.  Again because of its location, the reservoir can store up nothing but polluted water, laden with mine waste and tainted with the poisons used in chemical-based vegetable production.”

Indeed, the national government should realize that in pursuing the San Roque project, it has made a gigantic error in judgment, they said. Bulatlat.com

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