Mayor Belen: Finally, Calmay River is deeper
SOME 500 truckloads of silt have already been dug out of the Calmay River as of May 26 and dredging operations continue as part of efforts to minimize flooding in Dagupan City, especially in southern barangays and downtown area.
Mayor Belen Fernandez has since advised parents of children who have gotten used to playing in the middle part of Calmay River, to forbid their children from playing in the same location.
Before the dredging, a mass of land about the size of a baseball field already surfaced during low tide.
“Before, children could even walk in the middle of the Calmay River during low tide. But they should not do that anymore because the river had been dredged making the river deeper.” Fernandez told newsmen.
That island-like mass of land, a result of siltation, that already began to block the flow of run-off water from upland, has since been removed through the ongoing dredging using machines deployed to Dagupan by the DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways).
One of the machines deployed is a brand new Watermaster III, an amphibious excavator dredger bought by the DPWH from Finland, and the other is an old but still reliable Dredge Visayas.
A third dredging machine is already in the area but remains docked pending completion of the repair.
DPWH agreed to deploy these dredging machines for at least one year until all the heavily silted rivers are already restored to their original state.
The city government will bankroll the fuel expenses for these machines for the first month of operations while the DPWH will take care of the cost for the succeeding months.
Rosario said the mayor has asked DPWH to train some personnel of the local engineering office to operate these dredging machines so that they can take over when DPWH’s operators are on their day off or after office hours.
The DPWH operators work only from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with one-hour noondaybreak five days a week.
Rosario said employees of the city engineering office can be asked to render overtime and work at night or on Saturdays and Sundays once trained to handle these machines.
The silt removed from the river is being made available to low-lying barangays that need filling materials.–LVM
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