Drowning but thirsty

I turned on the tap this morning and clean water came out. At least I still have water. Despite recent rains, reservoir levels are still below comfortable levels. The country is on the cusp of a prolonged drought triggered by an emerging El Niño. The government is closely monitoring water supply across service areas.

Angat Dam supplies more than 90% of Metro Manila’s raw water. One dam. One source. One fault line nearby. And right now, with El Niño seen to run longer and harder than usual, that single source is carrying the full weight of supplying drinking water to over 14 million people as well as farms in Central Luzon.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources has already named the condition. Water bankruptcy. Not a shortage. Not a crisis. Bankruptcy: a state where long-term water use has exceeded renewable inflows. Where aquifers, wetlands, rivers, and soils have been damaged in ways that are not realistically reversible on human time scales.

The World Bank has warned that the Philippines’ urban water demand is projected to double by 2035, while available supply could drop by up to 25% due to watershed degradation. Contrary to popular belief, groundwater is not an infinite backup. It can run out.

This did not arrive without warning. Angat opened in 1967, built for a metropolis of roughly three million people. It now serves over 14 million. Since at least 2012, it has been flagged as a seismic risk, sitting in proximity to the Valley Fault System.

A drought, earthquake, infrastructure failure, or watershed crisis affecting Angat remains a first-order national vulnerability. We have known this for over a decade but have done too little structurally different about it. Political will to resolve it has been intermittent at best.

The Kaliwa Dam in General Nakar in Quezon was first proposed decades ago, revived repeatedly across administrations, and finally funded through a Chinese loan in 2018. As of February, it is on track for completion by 2028 to deliver 600 million liters per day through a 27.7-kilometer conveyance tunnel.

The project delay was not purely technical. It was a governance failure that was predictable. The project became entangled in the consent process involving Dumagat-Remontado communities whose ancestral lands it crosses. Anyone who studied the history of Philippine dam projects could have seen this coming.

The Laiban Dam, supposed to deliver 1.8 billion liters per day as Kaliwa’s companion, has been proposed since 1979, approved, deferred, canceled, and revived across every administration since Marcos Sr. It remains unbuilt. Instead, what we have is continued dependence on Angat and on groundwater extraction that is sinking our towns.

Singapore faced a harder version of this problem. A city-state with no hinterland, no major mountain watershed, no big river to dam. It first secured a water supply agreement with neighboring Malaysia. Then it redesigned its entire relationship with water.

Singapore built the Four National Taps: local catchment, imported water, NEWater, and desalination. NEWater is treated used water, purified through membranes and ultraviolet disinfection to a standard safe enough to drink. It now supplies up to 40% of Singapore’s water needs, targeted to reach 55% by 2060.

Singapore also built a 48-kilometer Deep Tunnel Sewerage System to move used water to reclamation plants instead of dumping it into the sea. As a result, daily per capita new water use dropped from 165 liters in 2003 to 151 liters now, and the country aims to reach 140 liters by 2030.

Manila produces used water every day and discharges most of it into Manila Bay as waste. Manila floods many times a year and sends the runoff into the same bay. It has no NEWater equivalent, no deep tunnel sewerage system, and no comparable plan to create one. Singapore’s answer was not to find new sources. It was to stop wasting what it already had.

Metro Manila is now building a subway. Right-of-way acquisition was at 90.92% as of February. The project has broken ground and is scheduled for completion in 2032. Its tunnels are being bored through some of the most flood-prone terrain in Southeast Asia.

Tokyo built its G-Cans system specifically to capture and divert the kind of floodwater that paralyzes cities during extreme rainfall. Officially known as the Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, G-Cans is the world’s largest underground flood control facility.

The subway tunnels are built for trains, not water. But whether the civil works can be designed to integrate flood capture, detention, or groundwater recharge is a question that must be asked before the concrete sets. Once those tunnels are finished, the opportunity is gone for a generation.

The same question applies to the North-South Commuter Railway (NSCR). Where the NSCR runs on elevated tracks, the land beneath the structure could, in sections, be engineered as drainage canals or water impounding basins, provided the integrity of the elevated track above is not compromised.

Manila’s water problem also has a waste dimension. The landfills serving the metropolitan area produce leachate, a liquid that forms as water percolates through decomposing garbage and can seep into soil and groundwater. Plastic fragments from waste systems also enter rivers and coastal waters.

In Central Luzon, where aquifers are reported to be the most stressed in the country, this is not a secondary concern. A landfill operated in Capas near Clark until 2025. The garbage is still there. Three landfills are being considered for Pampanga. A region cannot solve its water crisis while its waste management risks poisoning the same underground reserves it depends on.

At the same time, groundwater extraction in major urban and coastal zones must be metered, capped, and publicly monitored. Metro Manila, Bulacan, Pampanga, and Cavite should be declared groundwater control zones, where extraction permits are tied to aquifer recharge rates and tighten automatically when water tables fall or salinity rises.

In the context of water bankruptcy and the looming threat of a severe El Niño, every large commercial building, mall, data center, and high-rise cluster drawing from a stressed aquifer without metering is quietly borrowing from a reserve with no replenishment guarantee.

A reclaimed water program for Metro Manila is an overdue investment. The technology exists and operates across Asia. A deep tunnel sewerage system for reclaiming water beneath Metro Manila is exactly the kind of infrastructure that Japan, through its urban water and flood control experience, can help design and finance here.

Somewhere in BGC, a 22,000-cubic meter detention tank was built underground to contain flood water then pump it out to the Pasig River. Something similar can be built in different parts of Metro Manila, but with the aim of recycling the water rather than simply discharging it.

The watershed feeding Angat is the most important piece of water infrastructure the Philippines has, and it is under constant pressure from deforestation, land conversion, and degradation in the Sierra Madre. Building more dams while the watershed feeding them degrades is the hydraulic equivalent of borrowing more to pay interest on existing debt.

Manila floods and thirsts at the same time. It is not a paradox. It is a policy choice that nobody made explicitly but that we have made collectively, by default, year after year, dam proposal by dam proposal, budget cycle by budget cycle.

We are in a state of water bankruptcy. Do we wait another decade, file another study, propose another dam, and let another generation inherit the same shrinking aquifer and the same flooded streets? Or do we finally decide that the tap running dry is not a weather event but a governance and planning failure, and act accordingly?

Marvin Tort is a former managing editor of BusinessWorld, and a former chairman of the Philippine Press Council.

matort@yahoo.com