World Water Week coincided with Holy Week

Holy Week as we all recently experienced placed everything on hold. There were no newspapers and even the major television news stations closed on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. By sheer coincidence, the UN International Decade for Action celebrated World Water Week on March 22 to 29 and so they could not project their Water for Life theme in the midst of a Holy Week news blackout.

In Bulacan, they are praying for rain. The rainy season is still two months away but they all fear that the rainy season may be delayed by the coming of a moderate occurrence of El Niño threatening the water supply, the big problem will be the water used for agriculture. That will account for 86 percent of our total water consumption. Industry uses 8 percent. Only 6 percent goes for household use. A study conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency showed that Metro Manila was one of the nine major cities listed as "water critical areas."

Former Senator Heherson T. Alvarez has called attention to the fact of a new danger to our water supply. It is not only a coming shortage but the fact that pollution is greatly aggravating our waters including the waters in our ocean, seas, lakes, rivers, streams, canals and estuaries. To commemorate World Water Week, he has come out with a stern warning entitled "Beware: The Trash in the Pacific." It says: "While garbage is thrown in landfills, scientists have learned that we have unknowingly been building an ‘oceanfill’ in the North Pacific gyre since the ‘plastic boom’ beginning in the 1950s and ’60s.

"It is estimated that more than 14 billion pounds of garbage are dumped each year into the world’s oceans.

"Each year, we join and organize Clean Up the World events in the Philippines. During the coastal clean up months of September and October, plastic is the number one item of concern making up well over 76 percent of the garbage collected.

"For the past 50 years or so, plastics that have made their way into the Pacific Ocean have been fragmenting and accumulating as a kind of swirling sewer in the North Pacific subtropical gyre.

"Currents in the North Pacific move in a clockwise spiral, or gyre, which tends to trap debris originating from sources along the North Pacific rim. Plastics and other waste have accumulated in the region, which includes the foraging areas of Pacific bird colonies, such as that of the Tern Island albatross and the Guadalupe Island albatross.

"An Ocean Current Simulator model from the National Ocean and Atmospheric Authority (NOAA) of the USA has predicted correctly the trajectory of plastic debris drift from Japan which moves eastward and from Canada and USA which moves westward. After 183 days, the plastic debris drift still remains mostly along its coastal origins except that some reached almost mid-Pacific. After three years, Japan debris drift has reached western USA coasts with some already moving back eastward;

"Canada and north USA debris drift has reached the southern Siberia archipelago while west USA’s has reached Japan, north east Mindanao and eastern Visayas in the Philippines!"