Anything Under the Sun
Guimaras - the Emerald Isle (1)
With its lush verdant vegetation all over, Guimaras is truly an emerald isle basking in the tropic sun.
Lying between Panay and Negros, this new island-province has all the ingredients of progress -- a rich fishing ground, rich natural resources, and abundant natural beautiful scenes.
Topping all these, is a sturdy population with rich historical and cultural heritage, under the leadership of its dynamic public officials led by Gov. JC Rahman A. Nava who are ever willing to push Guimaras to progress. In fact, it is on its take off phase on its bold and progressive programs -- but now seriously threatened.
Indeed, suddenly something awful happened on August 11 dashing to pieces almost all hopes and aspirations of a progressive Guimaras.
MT Solar 1, an oil tanker cruising from Bataan to Zamboanga, sank some 18 kilometers from the coastline of Nueva Valencia, the southernmost town of the province bringing down with it three million liters of bunker oil to the bottom of the sea, 4,000 feet below sea level.
This huge volume of bunker oil will leak to the sea and spread all over the vast expanse of waters creating an oil spill expected to be the greatest in the history of our country.
This oil spill will hit the ingredients of progress cited above.
On the rich fishing ground -- The vicinity of the tragedy itself is a rich fishing ground of the province which supplies food not only for the island but also for Iloilo City. It is also a virtual aquarium full of coral reefs -- habitat of many indigenous exotic marine creatures like decorative fishes, sharks (bagis), manta rays (pagi), octopus (kogita), lobster (banagan), deep sea crabs (kasag), rare delicious sea shell (imbao) and rare red shrimp (pasayan nga pula). As of this writing, already 15.8 square kilometers of coral reefs are already affected in Nueva Valencia alone.
The coral reefs must really be very abundant considering that it was here where the coral stones of the entire Molo church were extracted a hundred years ago. This could have been the reason why the people of Nueva Valencia adopted Santa Ana -- the patron saint of Molo, as also their patron saint.
The situs of the 1,100-hectare Taklong Island Marine Reserve of the University of Philippines in the Visayas which conducts scientific experiments on marine life is also here. The first Mariculture Park of the Southeast Asia Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) was likewise situated here. These two are already reached by the oil spill thus diminishing their scientific values.
(To be continued)