ANGELES CITY – It is touted to be better than the existing international gateways of Hong Kong and Singapore.
It will have four runways with a length of 3,600 meters each and can accommodate as many as 250 plane take-offs and landings per hour including four Airbus 380 planes landing simultaneously. It will even have an elevated toll road that would connect it to the Makati central business district making it the best in the South East Asian region.
But the $10 billion cost to build San Miguel Corporation’s (SMC) proposal for a brand new airport is literally money down the drain or more appropriately “money thrown into the sea,” said the Pinoy Gumising Ka Movement (PGKM), a multi-sectoral group based in this city advocating the full and immediate development of the Clark International Airport (CIA).
PGKM Chair Ruperto Cruz said SMC’s new airport’s flaw is its location. News reports indicate that SMC’s new airport, which was presented to President Aquino last week in Malacañang by its president Ramon Ang, will be located along CyberBay Corp.’s disrupted waterfront reclamation project along the Manila-Cavite Coastal Road covering the cities of Parañaque and Las Piñas.
Cruz pointed out that recent calamities should have taught us by now that climate change is real. He said Typhoon Ondoy in late September 2009 caused widespread flooding especially in Metro Manila. With only 85 kph winds, storm surges turned Roxas Boulevard along Manila Bay and immediate environs with chest-high floodwaters rendering the otherwise busy highway impassable.
Even the might of the only world superpower was no match to nature’s wrath as the US Embassy along the boulevard was not spared from the flooding and storm surges. Cruz said accessibility will also pose a problem since the new airport will surely be elevated to protect it from flooding and will only have the congested Manila-Cavite Coastal Road as access point other than the proposed elevated highway to Makati.
Manila is already bursting at the seams, said Cruz, why build another airport there? He asked. “This is preserving Imperialized Manila at all costs, even to the utter detriment of the rest of the Philippines,” Cruz reasoned.
He said what happened at the Tacloban airport on November 8 last year at the height of Supertyphoon Yolanda should be enough reason to jolt us to our senses that an airport near the sea is “impractical.”
‘Lethal risks’ Meanwhile, the PGKM warned that SMC should be ready for civil society groups and environmentalists who will surely oppose the plan to reclaim 1,600 hectares of land from the sea where the brand new airport will be built.
Based on news reports, Dr. Kelvin Rodolfo, Environmental Sciences Professor at the University of Illinois, said the reclamation of only 148-hectare of the Manila Goldcoast Reclamation Project along Manila Bay would “pose lethal risks to many people including danger of land subsidence, storm surges, storm waves and further ecological damage to coastal ecosystem.”
Eloiza Tolentino, coordinator of the Eco- Waste Coalition, had said that Manila Goldcoast’s 148-hectare reclamation project “would need 19 million cubic tons of sand that would destroy coastal ecosystem.”
Environmentalists also said “further reclamation would not only damage the remaining coastal habitat and eco-system but will also effectively block the natural pathways of the river system flowing into the bay, thus increasing the threats of massive flooding in Metro Manila.”
SMC’s airport proposal is a massive 1,600 hectares of land reclamation in the same area.
