TACLOBAN CITY — The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) in Eastern Visayas ordered the suspension of a seawall project in Borongan City due to numerous complaints of environmental damage it is causing that will impact the livelihood of marginal fishermen.

DPWH regional director Edgar Tabacon ordered the project contractor to immediately stop all the construction work after conducting an ocular inspection on Tuesday.

“As of today, I have already instructed the representative of the contractor to temporarily stop the construction work,” he said after the inspection.

Tabacon admitted that his office was swamped with complaints coming from the city government, barangay officials, and other interest groups asking his office to stop the construction of the seawall intended to protect the city’s shoreline.

The project aims to construct a 1,365-meters barrier that spreads across 2-kms of the city’s beachfront. The seawall construction is divided into six phases with a budget of P144 million for each phase.

Tabacon said DPWH-8 will conduct consultations and dialogues with the LGU and other affected sectors to determine how the project will proceed.

“We will have a dialogue and decide later where the alignment of the wall will be located,” he said. “We will temporarily suspend the work while the request for the realignment of the wall is still to be decided by DPWH.”

The city government and barangay officials of the villages that will be affected resisted the project saying it was already encroaching on the reef that serves as a sanctuary to a diverse fish species.

The contractor reportedly extracted corals that used as the foundation of the seawall.

Borongan City Mayor Jose Ivan Dayan Agda said that the city government neither requested the DPWH to construct the seawall nor was it consulted before the construction started.

Agda said no infrastructure should be permitted to encroach on Borongan’s reef line especially that the reef system serves as the city’s best defense against calamities, having recently discovered that corals are present even beyond the shoreline and underneath the vastness of sand of its beach.