BAGUIO CITY – The trash problem here
was magnified anew with more than 300 students, faculty members and
non-teaching staff of the Philippine Science High School campus here in
Barangay Irisan complaining they are actually holding classes in an open dump
site.
“Even you cannot endure the stench,”
Conrado Rotor Jr., PSHS director described the air around the newly built
four-storey, 16-classroom building of the government-run secondary school
servicing intellectually-gifted and talented Filipino children in the Cordillera
and the rest of Northern Luzon.
In several times of the day, when classes are
on-going, truckloads upon truckloads of garbage are dumped less than 30
meters from the school.
"Buti kung everyday, inaalis nila,
pero hindi.” Rotor said, while reminding that the virtually open
dumpsite was supposedly a “staging area” only of Baguio’s garbage before it is
brought to Capas, Tarlac.
“A solution is in the pipeline,” said Engr.
Romeo Concio of the General Services Office of the city, adding that a chemical
will be used to douse off the nauseating stench.
“But imagine an open dump site right beside a
school?,” the school official said as he cites the school hosts 330
students from all over Cordillera and the rest of Northern Luzon, 31 faculty
members and 14 non-academic personnel.
The virtual open dump site, which the city
government has been using as “transfer facility”, still sits along the 3.7
hectare land appropriated by the government.
“We already moved our classes opening from
June 10 to June 17 to accommodate some adjustments like that of the foul smell
that can affect the students and everyone,” Rotor said.
A series of meetings between Phil Science
High School officials and Mayor Mauricio Domogan were held.
Benguet villagers had sued Baguio via a
Writ of Kalikasan after six were killed in a mammoth trash slide at the Irisan
dumpsite in August 2011.
Domogan has continuously vowed to find
a solution to the garbage problem. The city, however, has yet to find a
suitable area to build a sanitary landfill.
Measures, according to the city
government, have been instituted before the classes started. This
includes a cement barrier to prevent garbage employees from reaching the
school.
Baguio churns out a minimum of 200 tons of
garbage a day.
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