by Diego Morra
Recently, the usually smug Ramon S. Ang (net worth estimated at $3.4-billion) assembled a gaggle of journalists and sympathetic columnists at the San Miguel Corp. (SMC) headquarters to launch his splenetic soliloquy against the anonymous “enemies of progress” who have blamed his pet project, the New Manila International Airport (NMIA) that took over Barangay Taliptip, Bulakan, Bulacan, for the flooding in Bulacan and Pampanga.
Ang failed the test immediately as a consistent critic of the project, the urban planner and architect Dr. Nathaniel “Dinky” von Einsiedel, already did a long commentary on the NMIA last year, tagging it as a disaster waiting to happen. Ang also has a number of architects and “world-class planners” who have backed NMIA to the hilt despite the strong opposition of such anonymous critics as the Phivolcs, Pagasa, National Mapping and Resources Information Authority (Namria), the University of the Philippines National Institute of Geological Sciences (NIGS), the UP Marine Science Institute (UP-MSI), the Bulacan provincial government, Bigkis Bulacan, Tindig Hagonoy, Pamalakaya, Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), Anakpawis, Defend Manila Bay and others.
Einsiedel’s presentation is more than accurate and the 5-year, 25-year, 100-year flood modelings for Bulakan, Bulacan show that the flood situation will worsen with the NMIA in operation. The maps clearly showed that the NMIA has blocked the natural drainage systems existing in Taliptip. As the airport expands, and the airport platform is raised between three meters and five meters, the higher the floods would be. The claim of Pampanga Rep. Anna York Bondoc that since the NMIA started, flooding in Pampanga towns worsened. She asked SMC: Where did you put the 100 million cubic meters of water? Others estimated that by reclaiming 2,500 hectares, a total of 250 million cubic meters of water would be displaced. Logically, the water would go to low-lying areas since the airport platform has been raised.
Ang is allergic to the word “reclamation” but that is precisely what he has been doing. The seabed quarrying of Boskalis does not intend to raise the low-lying areas of Bulakan but to protect Ang’s airport. From July to November 2024, Taliptip was inundated with the worst flooding in history and Ang washed his hands off the dirty matter, since he is also working to prevent flooding. Nice try. Yet, in GR 133250, Frank Chavez vs Public Estates Authority, Amari Coastal Bay Dev’t Corp., the SC ruled that submerged areas are inalienable and beyond the commerce of man, which includes Ramon S. Ang. He did not only engage in seabed quarrying but also ruined the breeding places of demersal or bottom dwelling fish species in Cavite.
Ramon S. Ang is not merely up against student activists’ his critics are academics, seismologists, geologists, mapping and weather experts. Their scholarly titles are nothing to sneeze at and their treatises on precisely the issue of subsidence, rise of sea levels, hydrology and the toxic results of industrial pollution in Manila Bay, Laguna de Bay and other waterways are far too many for Ang to read and understand. Ang is one of the country’s illustrious do-gooders, and he has been mighty proud of his Better Rivers PH project that has cleaned up the rivers of Bulacan, or at least six of them, and the rivers in Laguna and many tributaries of Laguna de Bay, at least 24 of them.
Pro bono, he calls the environmental charity, but the dredged materials surely ended up in Taliptip, all 4.3-million metric tons (MMT) of them. Wait, the champion of the ecology is also the beneficiary of two seabed quarrying projects off Cavite towns, each one covering 2,500 hectares for a total of 5,000 hectares. And we thought all along that the bottom of Manila Bay was beyond the commerce of man, according to the High Tribunal! The law covers thee but not me. Ang should always tote a rucksack of patience to weather the criticism of observers that the republic extended special favors for Ang when it also gave control of NAIA to him. A fatal vehicular accident and a ceiling that crashed were not exactly good omens for a business that grants Ang the right to set terminal fees, increase rents, parking fees and long-term leases to a jet repair facility. For this, Ang has been sued by a group of lawyers, not for being smarter than others but for dubious provisions in the NAIA award.
Ramon S. Ang has threatened to sue these critics for exercising their right to seek redress of grievances, which is exactly what the flood victims of Bulacan have been doing since last year. Is Ang now the foremost champion of the neofascist maxim “rules for thee but not for me”? The London-based Global Witness also documented the military harassment of 300 fishing and farming families of Taliptip who were alternately cajoled, harassed and pressured to abandon or demolish their dwellings, and their land, too, in exchange for a pittance. With the NMIA now creating its own enclave in Bulakan, Bulacan, the decision of the Supreme Court (SC) in 2008 for the local governments of Metro Manila and the provinces sharing Manila Bay must clean up the waterway and guarantee that bay, a natural resource to be enjoyed by the people, must be beyond the commerce of man.
Well, Manila Bay is not beyond the commerce of Ramon Ang, who crafted the NMIA as an unsolicited proposal in 2017, breezed through the Department of Transportation (DoTR), the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and “found” no opposition in getting it approved by President Rodrigo Duterte, whose regime had qualms in parceling out Manila Bay into cute packages of 32 reclamation projects to benefit plutocrats, the Sy family, the Gatchalians, the family of Agriculture Secretary Franco Tiu Laurel, Ang himself since he has an entire islet in Navotas (the burned sanitary landfill) as a way station for the expressway from NMIA to Metro Manila. Ang was also roundly criticized for the “massacre” of more than 600 hardwood trees in Manila, cut down to allow the construction of yet another expressway. Until he was savaged for offering to build another road beside Pasig River, Ang was keen on constructing riverine highways.#
