Pila balde

To be fair to President Marcos, he’s not the first person to suggest collecting rainfall in buckets or balde.

Several typhoons ago, during an interview on recurring flooding in Metro Manila, University of the Philippines geology professor Mahar Lagmay had told us that if people in a community simultaneously collected rainwater in buckets during a downpour, it would significantly reduce the street runoff, easing pressure on inadequate drains and minimizing flooding.

Lagmay is best known as the executive director of Project NOAH, a disaster prevention initiative under the Department of Science and Technology that was launched in 2012 during the presidency of Noynoy Aquino. Under BBM, the Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards has received P1 billion in fresh funding.

This came nearly a decade after the Duterte administration terminated funding for Project NOAH in 2017, prompting UP to “adopt” the program under its Resilience Institute.

With NOAH forgotten, all the crooks were given a wide room to implement unscientific, piecemeal, for-personal-profit flood control interventions. Several of these projects, as we are now finding out to our dismay, were either substandard or non-existent.

The collected rainfall could be used for gardening, cleaning driveways and similar activities, Lagmay had told “Storycon” on One News.

BBM suggested collecting rainfall in buckets not to reduce flooding, but to have a reserve water supply for the approaching “super” El Niño, which is expected to last four to five months.

The problem with this suggestion is that storing rainwater too long risks turning it into a breeding ground for mosquitoes. I once lived in a house with an old-style concrete, triangular cistern for harvesting rainwater. It had a spigot at the bottom and the water was used for washing dishes and doing the laundry. But if the water was not used long enough, kiti-kiti or mosquito larva soon appeared and the cistern, which had no cover, would be drained. 

BBM’s suggestion to buy balde to catch rainwater was followed up with a demonstration on how to filter harvested rainwater or murky water into potable water.

Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary Rex Gatchalian led the demonstration of the portable, gravity-based Sawyer water filtration kit that is attached to a standard 20-liter plastic bucket. The DSWD will be distributing the filtration kit for free in high-density communities in Metro Manila and in disaster-hit areas.

The water filtration kit supposedly removes 99.99 percent of harmful microorganisms including bacteria that cause cholera and salmonella, protozoa and even microplastics.

At the end of the demo at Malacañang, Gatchalian and Palace press officer Claire Castro drank the filtered water. So far, there are no reports that either of them has landed in the hospital due to acute diarrhea.

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The filtration kit is indeed useful and the suggestion to buy more buckets would have made sense if the messaging had been better managed.

BBM suggested buying balde while he was in Singapore at Pinoy taxpayers’ expense supposedly for a chance to chat with other world leaders at the Formula One Grand Prix. But he was the only head of government who joined Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong at the F1. Wong of course had to be there, being the leader of the host country.

If BBM had at least asked for a briefing from the Singaporeans on their sophisticated water retention and recycling system plus their waste-to-energy network that helps keep the city-state squeaky-clean, Pinoys might have seen some usefulness in BBM’s trip.

Instead it looked like someone just scrounged around for a meeting coinciding with F1 that BBM could attend so that the junket could be packaged as a working visit and charged to Juan and Juana dela Cruz.

That’s sure to be a hefty bill for us working stiffs. Last July, Singapore was ranked for the fourth consecutive year as the world’s most expensive city for high-net-worth individuals (a.k.a. the rich), according to the Global Wealth and Lifestyle Report 2026.

The balde suggestion also highlighted the water insecurity in the Philippines. Castro had to belatedly provide the context, as jokes and criticisms flew about pila balde, bucket lists and baket kasi ibinoto nyo.

Water infrastructure is being improved, Castro assured the nation, even as the government appeals for water conservation, retention and recycling.

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In the National Capital Region, however, the government has yet to deliver its end of the deal, which is to provide additional water sources for distribution by the private water concessionaires.

The concessionaires are instead moving to create their own rainfall retention systems. Maynilad has also rolled out its NEW WATER program, which converts wastewater into safe drinking water.

Angat Dam remains the principal source of water for Metro Manila. Laguna de Bay, tapped to augment the supply in the southern Metro, is shrinking rapidly, thanks to continuing frenzied reclamation along C-6 from Taguig to Taytay.

When water supply is low, water from the taps becomes turbid. I see this in the portable filters in my home. I have two sets – one connected directly to the tap, and another for the second filtration after the water has gone through the first set of filters.

The first filter quickly turns mustard yellow and then coffee brown, so I know how dirty the tap water is.

As for Kaliwa Dam, I doubt if it will ever come onstream in my lifetime.

In Maynilad’s service area, many households have massive cistern tanks that can hold up to three days’ worth of needed supply. These households need not buy buckets to store water during El Niño. 

The tanks were needed for survival in the days when water supply in the area lasted only two to four hours every other day and was sourced from groundwater.

In providing the needed big-ticket water infrastructure, time has run out for BBM. He will be bowing out with large swaths of the country lacking water and electricity.

And among the enduring images of the final months of his administration will be the pila balde at water pumps.