DPWH vows to finish Camanava flood project by yearend

MANILA, Philippines - The Camanava Flood Control Project, touted to solve the flooding woes of the cities of Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas and Valenzuela, will be finished by December, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) officials promised yesterday.

Engineer Macariola Bartolo, DPWH Project Management Office (PMO) chief, made the “fearless forecast” in an interview with The STAR yesterday. Her statement came two years after the project was supposed to have been completed in June 2007.

The project was initiated and first inaugurated under the Estrada administration in 2001. President Arroyo followed up on the project and inaugurated it for the second time in 2003. Actual construction began in 2004.

When asked to give the public “the real score” on the controversial project, Bartolo claimed the project is currently “90.27 percent finished.”

Malabon officials, led by Mayor Canuto Oreta, himself a civil engineer and contractor, have complained on many occasions of the “painfully snail-paced progress” of the work remaining on the project.

The figure Bartolo gave yesterday represented an improvement of only a little over two percentage points from the 88 percent she cited in an official report in July last year.

Malabon city officials, including members of the multi-sectoral flood advisory council convened last year, said they did not even have a way of verifying the figures cited by Bartolo and other DPWH officials.

Bartolo told The STAR what remains are a few more river improvement works in Barangays Catmon and Longos. She said there are still “gaps” (measuring a total of three to four kilometers) between existing natural waterways that still have to be corrected.

She added that only the Estero de Maypajo, on the common border of Caloocan and Malabon, is left to be rehabilitated.

Bartolo, reminded about the unfinished Dampalit polder (earthen) dikes that were breached in 2008, assured The STAR the kilometer-long first phase is finished and only almost a kilometer on the Pinagkabalian River side remains to be completed.