SC junks plea writ vs Marcopper dams The Supreme Court has turned down the petition for the issuance of a Writ of Kalikasan against the construction of Boac River Reclamation Project. The 15-man tribunal during their en banc session dismissed the petition citing insufficiency in form and substance. Former Boac, Marinduque mayor Pedrito Nepomuceno, in his five-page petition, claimed the reclamation project and the Marcopper Mining Corp.’s abandoned Makulapnit Dam and Maguila-guila Dam in Sta. Cruz, Marinduque causes “perennial flooding in the Poblacion area and the Kabilang Ilog Barangays in Boac.” Respondents in the petition are Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) Secretary Ramon Paje, Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Rogelio Singson and Marinduque Govenor Carmencita Reyes. Written by Benjamin B. Pulta Thursday, 16 October 2014 He also emphasized that the project’s poorly built protective dike has failed to provide protection to the people living in Barangays Tabi, Poras, Tabigue and Lupac. “That sometime in 1992 when the newly constructed dike of the reclamation project (they found out later that the reinforcement used in the dike were bamboos and not steel bars), gave way due to flood waters and with part of the original flood control dike demolished (without appropriate permission), a structure which is much stronger and reliable than the new dike and has protected the town proper of Boac for more than 50 years, for the first time in decades, the Poblacion of Boac was flooded damaging millions worth of properties,” the petition stated. The petitioner also claimed that some sectors, including professional engineers, have already proposed to discontinue the project because it always pose danger to the lives and properties of the residents living along the riverbanks. “There was also an opinion from some professional engineers that a river can not be the subject of a reclamation project as we can not control the flow of waters in a river, unlike a shoreline where water flows only in one direction,” Nepomuceno said. The former mayor also pointed out that during his term as provincial board member in 2004 to 2007, he repeatedly asked the DENR to require the DPWH Regional District Offices to submit an Environmental Impact Analysis (EIA) and Environmental Compliance Certificate (ECC) and other DENR requirements, but his appeal was just ignored. “That the DPWH, with so much threat, due to the erroneous reclamation project, to people’s lives and properties, the DPWH can not claim that they started the project in 1981 and that it is not subject to the DENR’s EIA and ECC requirements which was adopted at a later date. The undersigned, however disagree for the simple reason that the original structure (dike) was totally destroyed before and the new structure was constructed when the EIA and ECC requirements are already in effect...”
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 11:21:27 +0000
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