Yesterday was Monday, the 13th. No, not the 13th day of the month of May, 2024 but the 13th day since we started experiencing the daily outage of water service originally explained by the Davao City Water District (DCWD) as a 13-hour temporary interruption to give way to a “tapping and looping” work on a newly installed pipeline along Tacunan Road from Deca Homes to the junction of Purok 2A.
The water loss that starts as early as 7 in the morning will continue to as late as 9 or ten in the evening. When the water comes back the pressure is so low that it will take an hour, even more, to fill a drum for storage purposes. The pressure though gets stronger after midnight and until dawn when it subsides again going to another day’s service outage.
This current condition of the water service in our place and its immediate neighboring villages reminds us of the much hyped promise of the water firm. That is, the water delivery to consumers will be boosted to the maximum when its joint Bulk Water Project with Apo Agua Infrastructura will be fully operational.
We believe that after the project implementer Apo Agua’s attention was called by the City Council for its failure to accomplish the project as scheduled, the bulk water delivery is finally in place.
However, with the proliferation of notices of water service interruptions in many parts of the city including areas supposed to be boosted by the bulk water delivery to DCWD storage facilities, we and without doubt many Davao consumers, are starting to entertain fear that both the DCWD and Apo Agua cannot make good their promise. Why? We can only surmise. But the experience residents in our barangay and its neighboring villages these past 13 days is more than enough proof of the likely failed commitment.
It is a good thing that on the part of DCWD it has established one very strong redeeming factor – the office front liners’ very customer-friendly behavior that amazes even those who were once treated miserably while having transactions with the agency – us included.
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We do not know how former Mayor (for the longest time and undefeated) and also former President of the Philippines Rodrigo Roa Duterte feels about the apparent resurgence of the illegal drugs business in his beloved Davao City. The city that he delivered from the clutches of the once notorious drug processors and dealers even reached to the point of being tagged as a “drug-free city” not just locally but nationally and internationally as well.
These days it appears that despite the former mayor’s son taking his place and trying to replicate – so far verbally – the strategy adopted by his father, the prohibited drug merchants seem to be doing their thing with gusto. And the situation is validated by the many arrests of drug merchants over the last few weeks. The latest of the drug buy-bust was a huge catch with the confiscated shabu estimated to cost P5 million in its street value.
The good thing though is that the recent operations of the law enforcers did not result to deaths of suspects, only arrest. Of course two illegal drugs suspects were killed by lawmen in an operation conducted barely days after the young Duterte aped the warning once used by his father during his time as mayor of the city.
Perhaps the elder Duterte still does not have the time to do some “tutorials” to his son Baste. He too, is busy attending to his own battle with the incumbent administration and its many lapdogs. The former President’s adversaries are doing everything to find ammunition to sustain their “battle” with Duterte and his allies.
The subalterns of the present administration are even contemplating on calling the former President to make him confirm a supposed “Gentlemen’s Agreement” he reportedly entered with Chinese President Zi Jing Ping on the west Philippine Sea issue.
The current administration lapdogs, most of them in the Lower House, are the ones accusing. So it is their responsibility to probe their accusation. They cannot have the former President help them probe of what some of them called a “treasonous act” allegedly committed by the former chief executive.
What a bunch of “uninitiated” these lapdogs are if only to dance with the administration’s music “in aid of re-election or slots in the admin Senate line-up!
