Photos: Contributed
As Super Typhoon “Goring” (Saoloa) started to lash through Luzon over the weekend and is expected to continue spawning heavy rains in the coming days, beach resorts and the shoreline of Subic Bay are seen to endure again the massive piles of garbage originating from nearby Olongapo City.
Parts of Olongapo have already been submerged in floodwater since Saturday (Aug. 26) due to the strong downpour, a recurring problem that the city government apparently failed to address during the typhoon season.
But the perennial widespread flooding in Olongapo that carries tons of trash spills over into the shoreline and waters off Subic Bay, forcing the beach resort operators to bear the brunt.
At All Hands Beach, for instance, the recent onslaught of Super Typhoon “Egay” (Doksuri), which also left a trail of devastation, including heaps of garbage, toward the latter part of July had to put up with a sea of trash that ended up on its premises.
From July 28 to Aug. 26, or exactly 30 days, the management of All Hands Beach had to clear 4,650 bags of trash that piled up along its shoreline.
A popular tourist destination inside the Subic Freeport, All Hands Beach had to carry out the massive and costly cleanup while trying to keep its guests safe from the possible ill-effects of the solid waste that washed ashore in the aftermath of Egay.
Data showed that the management of All Hands Beach had to hire 50 trucks and a payloader to remove the discarded trash that the floods dragged from Olongapo.
It took four days for the payloader to transfer the collected garbage into the trucks, with All Hands Beach shouldering all the costs.
With the looming threat of floods and the trash that comes with them amid the onslaught of Goring, the management of All Hands and other beach resorts inside the Subic Bay Freeport feared that they would once again experience a similar problem.
The concern raised by the beach resort operators, who are also the key movers in the tourism sector of the freeport, is anchored on the fact that the same issue has been troubling them for more than a decade now.
Is the current administration of the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) ignorant about the matter? Are there immediate solutions that may be at hand, or is the issue not at all important to the agency, which keeps on affirming that one of its major thrusts is to strengthen its tourism sector?
Will the appeal of the beach resort operators for a little help from the officials of SBMA and Olongapo City continue to fall on deaf ears?
