Nearly a year after the Chief Executive used his biggest annual platform to call out the anomalies in the public works agency, a controversial circumferential road project snaking around one of the nation’s most ecologically sensitive lakes has quietly resumed construction — as if the scolding never happened.

The project, a 114-kilometer ribbon of concrete ambition wrapping around a roughly 234-square-kilometer volcanic crater lake, lies in the country’s premier wine-and-beef region. It was born under a yellow president, gained dangerous muscle under the drug war president, survived a volcanic tantrum that made the whole world watch, and is now apparently thriving under a Solid North president whose State of the Nation Address (SoNA) called out the very agency that is enabling it.

The lake in question isn’t just any body of water. It is, for all intents and purposes, a living laboratory, home to a sardine species found nowhere else on earth, a sea snake that forgot how to go back to the sea, and a prized table fish whose freshwater variant commands a premium at any decent Batangueño fiesta. Fisherfolk and tilapia cage farmers who depend on its waters for their daily livelihood are understandably alarmed.

The lake sits barely five meters above sea level — a detail that makes engineers wince and volcanologists lose sleep. The geological body tasked with monitoring the lake’s submerged natural walls has reportedly gone quiet on the condition of those formations, which have reportedly been hollowing out from successive displacement waves.

Barangay-level officials are now quietly building a case, citing possible violations across multiple agency mandates, while advocates are pressing a provincial congressman to bring the matter straight to Malacañang to seek a presidential proclamation of protected status, a rerouting of the offending road, and a moratorium on heavy construction permits along the entire lake perimeter.

The “Save the Lake” chorus is getting louder, hopefully enough to make the tenant in the Palace listen.