Breaches along Tarlac river’s newly fixed dikes pose danger

TARLAC CITY – Breaches along the Tarlac River’s supposedly newly repaired dikes and the caving-in of its foundations have become a clear and present danger to this city’s low-lying villages, farmlands and commercial district as intermittent heavy rains continued to swell the waterway.

Among the significant damages sustained by the river in at least two strong southwest monsoons that hit Luzon last July were the collapse of its flood-control dikes in Barangay Armenia, one of which left about 200-linear meter gap on its endangered banks that threatened the village with severe damages.

Incidentally, the river’s damages in Armenia are within the waterway’s junction with the O’Donnell River, where excess floodwaters cascading from the slopes of Mt. Pinatubo and Central Luzon’s western mountain ranges flow into. Also, the threatened village is just behind the Camp Gen. Servillano Aquino, headquarters of the Armed Forces’ Northern Luzon Command, and a few kilometers away from the Cojuangco-owned Plaza Luisita Mall and commercial complex.

Other imperiled portions of the Tarlac River’s dikes were noted by the city engineer’s office here in Barangays Urquico and San Luis, which threaten ricefields, while a newly-repaired concrete embankment of the channel in Sitio Pangulo in Barangay Carangian has already totally collapsed. Similarly eroding are concrete dikes in Barangay Tibag, which made the Rio Madera Hotel and Resort vulnerable to severe flooding, as well as in Barangay Cutcut-I, threatening the College of Engineering compound of the Tarlac State University. In Barangay Salapungan, the scouring of the Tarlac River’s dikes were found by government engineers here to have been compounded by the caving-in of its foundations.