Tacloban water woes ‘disaster in the making’
The cholera outbreak in Tacloban City opened the proverbial pandora’s box of the long-drawn problem with water supply in the city.
Daily TribuneThe cholera outbreak in Tacloban City opened the proverbial pandora’s box of the long-drawn problem with water supply in the city.
TACLOBAN CITY — When news broke out of cases of diarrhea in their neighborhood, Verna Cordero, a 24-year-old sales clerk and resident of Barangay 106 here, had no second thoughts to bring her two children to her mother's house in a coastal community here.
"Safety of my children first before anything else," said the mother of two, adding that her eldest son, a first grader in a public school, will be absent from school for the meantime while there remains no clear solution to the water problem that caused illness to over 100 residents.
"I know this will happen someday. We have been complaining of the dirty water in our village but nobody seems to care. And then this happened," she said.
The cholera outbreak in Tacloban City opened the proverbial Pandora's box of the long-drawn problem with water supply in the city affecting over 12,000 families living in different housing projects that were established in the post-"Yolanda" rehabilitation.
Despite the lingering problem, there seems to be no immediacy to come up with a long-term solution as the remedial measures to fix it seemed to have been working until the cholera outbreak came.
The Tacloban City Health Office reported that as of 27 October five people have died due to severe dehydration caused by acute watery diarrhea — two of them were from Barangay 106, the epicenter of the outbreak.
As of the same date, a total 344 acute water diarrhea has already been reported — 109 of them were recorded in a single day. Of these total number of cases, 255 are under home management, 98 were admitted in different hospitals while nine have recovered.
Records from TCHO also show that of the 344 acute watery diarrhea cases, 228 of them were from Barangay 106.
Water samples gathered by the Department of Health regional office and the TCHO on raw water at the source, the processed water, and on the pipes leading to households in Barangay 106 all showed positive of contamination of total coliform and Escherichia coli or E. Coli. A water refilling station found inside the village was likewise tested positive of both total coliform and E.Coli.
"We know the water is dirty. It is murky especially when it rains and there is a trace of a foul smell," Cordero said. "We don't drink the water that comes out of the faucet."
"We have been complaining about this to the city government and to our water supplier. We are always told that it is clean since the water is chlorinated," she added.
Residents in the different relocation sites have been demanding that they be connected to the city's main water supply of Leyte Metropolitan Water District, now called Prime Water Leyte Metro.