Facilities that will serve as venue for the upcoming Southeast Asian (SEA) Games 2019 will undergo upgrading and improvement in time for Subic’s co-hosting of the sporting event on Nov. 30 to Dec. 11.

Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) Chairman and Administrator Wilma T. Eisma said massive repair work will be undertaken at sports facilities like Remy Field and Subic Gym here despite the onset of the rainy season.

Artist’s perspective of the proposed upgrading of the Remy Field track oval and viewing stand

“We’re right on schedule,” Eisma said, describing the preparations here for the 30th edition of the biennial competition. “The Subic venues will be completed in time for the SEA Games.”

The Subic Bay Freeport will be the venue for 16 out of the 56 sports scheduled for the 2019 SEA Games, which will involve participants from the 11 countries comprising Southeast Asia.

Eisma said that for this purpose, the SBMA has signed agreements with the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to improve the facilities here, with SBMA as project fund source and DPWH as lead implementing agency.

“We have the funds, but we don’t have the technical expertise,” Eisma explained. “So partnering with the DPWH is the most logical choice.”

Artist’s perspective of the proposed new façade for the Subic Gym

Under the agreements, DPWH will prepare all the plans, designs, technical specifications and cost estimate for the building construction, as well as hire contractors for the projects. It will also provide the SBMA with project status reports from contractors to serve as bases for payment.

Remy Field, which contains a track oval, will get an upgrade with a new nine-lane track from the previous six, as well as a covered viewing stand. It will be rehabilitated at the cost of P127,805,000.

Meanwhile, the Subic Gym will get a new facade and interior upgrade at the price of P5,700,000.

Upgrading of the Subic Bay Exhibition and Convention Center will be handled by DPWH national office.

The SBMA chief said the quality of the sports venues in Subic would significantly define the SEA Games experience for delegates, as well as the general impression of how Philippines hosted the event.

“That is why we want to make sure that our facilities will be at par with SEA Games standards,” Eisma said. “We will be hosting foreign athletes, and giving them a great venue would also mean a great tourism calling card for Subic.”

SEA Games events will be held in eight venues in Subic: Remy Field, which will be used for training and cultural presentations; Subic Bay Sports Complex, venue for sepak takraw, beach volleyball and beach handball; Subic Bay Exhibition and Convention Center for muay Thai, pencak silat and table tennis; and the SBMA Boardwalk for triathlon, duathlon, and modern pentathlon.

Meanwhile, privately-owned venues will also be used for other SEA Games events: Subic Bay Yacht Club for sailing and windsurfing; Kamana Sanctuary Resort for traditional boat race and canoe and kayak; Subic Bay Travellers Hotel for chess; and Acea Subic Bay resort for rowing.

Eisma said that in most venues here, the SBMA will provide lounges, practice areas, medical stations, dressing rooms, media interview areas, and even prayer rooms for use of the various sports delegations.

The Philippines last hosted the biennial SEA Games 14 years ago, with Subic as venue for archery, canoeing, sailing and triathlon out of the 40 sports competitions held.

For the 2019 edition of the Games, Subic, along with New Clark City, Metro Manila, and the Batangas, La Union and Tagaytay cluster, will be the venue for some 523 events in 56 sports fields.

Source: subicnewslink.blogspot.com

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Ahead of the entry of a white knight into its shipbuilding hub in Subic, South Korean shipbuilder Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction Co Ltd (HHIC) hatched a strategic alliance with Yuchengco group-led construction firm EEI Corp for upcoming construction projects in the Philippines.

This strategic alliance is seen to make use of HHIC’s special intellectual property in underground infrastructure, railway and airport construction projects. HHIC is thus expected to continue doing business in the Philippines even when the Subic shipyard will be sold in the future.

“EEI’s strategic alliance with Hanjin refers to infrastructure construction projects. It has nothing to do with shipbuilding or shipyard [operation],” a source privy to HHIC’s rehabilitation said.

EEI and HHIC have previously worked together on projects such as the Berth 6 Manila International Container project, EEI disclosed to the Philippine Stock Exchange on Friday.

The local construction firm has successfully participated in numerous infrastructure, electromechanical and building projects, with substantial operations in the Philippines and abroad.

HHIC has completed more than 100 construction projects in the Philippines since 1973.

Following the filing of bankruptcy in Korea, five Philippine banks have acquired a combined 20 per cent equity in HHIC to recover part of their $412 million credit exposure to the cash-strapped Korean firm alongside an upcoming sale of the latter’s vast shipyard in Subic.

Yuchengco-led RCBC has a $145-million credit exposure to Hanjin, the largest among local banks. Other local creditor-banks and their estimated exposure are Metropolitan Bank & Trust Co ($72 million), Bank of the Philippine Islands ($52 million), BDO Unibank ($60 million) and Land Bank of the Philippines ($80 million).

Of the $412 million exposure of local banks in Hanjin, $263 million was tied to the 305ha shipyard in Subic. The creditors are now in evaluating offers for this facility and a deal is expected to be firmed up by September.

The other method of recovery is through the conversion of debt to shares in HHIC Korea. While 20 per cent has been acquired by Philippine banks, HHIC’s Korean creditors, including Korea Development Bank, have taken over a 63 per cent stake in the company. The creditors can opt to sell individually using the open market.

Source: phnompenhpost.com

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BOTOLAN, Zambales – Some 184 households received shelter units from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) recently.

The beneficiaries were those affected by heavy rainfalls brought by Typhoon Kiko 10 years ago which devastated the municipality of Botolan. The increase of water level caused the earth dike in Bukaw River to breach, flooding the neighbouring barangays. Thousands of individuals were affected and hundreds of houses were damaged.

The DSWD initiated programs and services for the early recovery and rehabilitation of the affected families, and one of these is the Core Shelter Assistance Program (CSAP).

The CSAP aims to provide resilient and hazard-free houses. This program is a partnership project between two parties: the DSWD covered the material cost, while the Local Government Unit (LGU) of Botolan provided the relocation site, at Kalib-ungan Resettlement.

However, due to the hazardous geographic location, the LGU identified a new site for the relocation, at Kainomayan Village.

The construction in Kainomayan Village began last March 2017. Because of delays in the completion of the project, a partnership between DSWD and AFP was initiated. Through KiSLAP ng CSAP, AFP deployed additional staff from the Engineering Battalion to support in the construction of the core shelter units.

Construction began on February 2, 2019. Two months later, all of the remaining units were already completed.

According to DSWD Secretary Rolando Bautista, “Sa mga kababayan natin na matiyaga at naghintay para sa araw na ito, malugod po namin ipinapabatid sa inyo na ngayong araw na ito ay mayroon na kayong ligtas at payapang masisilungan kasama ang inyong pamilya.”

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METROPOLIS RISING An artist’s rendition of New Clark City’s land-use map. —BASES CONVERSION AND DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY

MANILA, Philippines — The plains and mountains of Capas, Tarlac, are tied to the stories of the Hungey, said to be the oldest Aeta tribe in the province.

Casimira Maniego, 68, looked out at the fields outside her home and remembered how her parents tended the green that had nurtured her and her five children. Everything she knows about the earth was passed on to her by her father, she said, the way it was passed on to her forebears.

“Our ancestors remain a part of our humanity,” she said. “Their presence is entwined with our daily lives and our environment.”

But their memories of home are in peril as the rapid development of the state-initiated New Clark City (NCC)—said to be the Philippines’ first smart and green metropolis—edges closer to their land now being claimed as eminent domain.

The NCC is set to be inaugurated on Nov. 6, but tens of thousands of farmers and tribespeople living in the development area are still ignorant of the project’s extent even as bulldozers have leveled their crops, according to a research led by the University of Glasgow (UG) in the United Kingdom and the University of the Philippines.

Displacement is imminent for the people who have tilled the land for decades, exposing them to the same disasters the NCC is being built to withstand.

P607-B metropolis

Located at Clark Special Freeport Zone in Capas and Bamban, NCC is a P607-billion metropolis touted as the country’s first “climate-change resilient” city.

This resilience is rooted in the master plan governing NCC’s entire economy, said Vince Dizon, chair of the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA). At its heart is clean energy and sustainable practices, which are expected to transform the way people commute and power their homes.

But a truly resilient city doesn’t just manage its resources well; it also empowers the most vulnerable, said Red Constantino of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities.

An archipelago with long, meandering coastlines and a tropical climate, the Philippines is among the countries most vulnerable to both sudden and slow-onset impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise and ocean acidification, Constantino said.

Citing the National Urban Development Housing Framework, he defined resilience as “the ability of a locality and its citizens to withstand impacts and shocks, and to rebuild, reorganize or transform itself when necessary.”

PUSHED BACK Aeta Mahawang families, who have called Mount Dalin home for generations,were pushed back to the fringes of Sitio Kalangitan in Capas, Tarlac province, as contractors of New Clark City, said to be the country’s first smart and green metropolis, shaved parts of the mountain’s forest cover. —KATHLEEN LEI LIMAYO/CONTRIBUTOR

“[It] encompasses the entirety of development, not just infrastructure sturdiness against disasters,” Constantino said, adding: “Acting on both disaster and climate risks also presents an opportunity to improve food and water security, secure livelihoods, and spur both sustainable development and economic growth.”

That’s also the impetus that drives NCC, Dizon said. Approved in 2015 during President Benigno Aquino III’s term, the project is expected to complete Phase 1 in time for its hosting of the Southeast Asian Games in November.

NCC is designed as an alternative to highly congested, poorly planned Manila. Modeled after green cities in Singapore and China, it was conceptualized by master planners from the Asian Development Bank, Japan Overseas Infrastructure Network, and Singapore’s Surbana Jurong.

“The vision [for NCC] was to be the first green, smart and truly resilient city, [and] the natural quality of the location gives it a strategically green and resilient character,” Dizon said.

Manila, for one, is at zero to 80 meters above sea level (masl) and sits atop several fault lines. NCC, on the other hand, is over 200 masl at its lowest and 800 at its peak.

Unlike Manila’s haphazard land use and development, NCC will develop only 40 percent of its land; the rest is for open space.

Development aggression

But Andre Ortega, a research fellow from UG who did a field investigation of areas covered by NCC, said the project was a classic case of development aggression.

Satellite images would bear him out. In the course of 18 months, NCC contractors managed to turn hectares of green into concrete.

It’s why Ortega and his team began countermapping the development in November 2018, peeling back the towns’ geographical boundaries and borders to expose the narratives and historical accounts of their marginalized people.

“Maps are the product of struggle,” Ortega said. “The
BCDA has [its] own map and [its] own master plan, a narrative about how it wants to project the place, and we also have our accounts in partnership with the community. [Counter]mapping is the tool to counterpose and contradict these narratives.”

For six months, Ortega’s team lived among some of the estimated 15,000 local farmers and 20,000 Aeta and Abeling from around 26 indigenous communities likely to be affected by the development.

The team listened to the residents’ stories, and provided disposable cameras with which to take pictures of places they deemed crucial to their daily routines. The team even identified landmarks that have yet to be mapped but were tied to the residents’ lives.

What emerged, Ortega said, was a picture of generations of lowland farmers and Aeta in Tarlac: The earth gave them food, and the mountain covers protected them from the battering of typhoons.

Forbidden land

But when NCC kick-started development in 2017, productive rice fields like those of “Michael” in Sitio Kamatis were abruptly flattened to make way for concrete roads.

The sitio is the main site of the ongoing construction for Phase 1, or the National Government Administrative Center.

The rice crops in Michael’s paddies were nearly ripe for harvest when the backhoes came in 2018 and laid nearly a hectare of palay to waste.

He was paid around P300,000 for the land, which will become part of the Capas-SCTEx highway to link the town to the metropolis. But the lost crops would have been equivalent to 150 cavans of rice, he said.

Contractors also shaved certain parts of the forest cover of Mount Dalin in Sitio Alli, a small straw-hat mountain where the Aeta used to plant ube and tended farm animals.

The Aeta consider Dalin—“Tela Kaban” in their tongue—an ideal place for newly harvested palay to dry under the sun. The trails are level, and the summit is good for planting root crops.

Like most nomadic tribespeople, “Melba,” an Aeta Mahawang in Kalangitan, equated comfort with the freedom to roam and to plant food.

Then the bulldozers arrived “noong ikatatlo (2017),” Melba said, and the mountain they called home for generations was suddenly “marked”—forbidden land.

They were pushed back to the fringes of the sitio. Suddenly they were cramped in a small area with little arable land. “Before, we didn’t think about these things,” she said. “We were free.”

So Melba sent her two sons, aged 19 and 22, to work at the NCC construction site as laborers. But they worry that when construction for Phase 1 is done in August, they will also be out of work.

Redirecting rivers

In retracing the residents’ geographical memories, the research team also found that NCC’s contractors had redirected the natural flow of Cutcut and Marimla rivers to make way for a 1.4-kilometer river park.

According to the NCC master plan, altering the rivers’ flow based on a 500-year flood projection maximizes the socioeconomic value while minimizing harm to the ecosystem.

Dizon said check dams and edges along the river would create a permanent 45-hectare lake midstream, both a renewable water source for the city and the heart of a central park for Phase 2.

But Yany Lopez, chair of UP’s geography department and Ortega’s coresearcher, said these drastic changes disturbed the fragile ecobalance.

Residents, especially kids, have noted that certain birds, fishes and prawn, and even snakes were disappearing from the area, she said.

These changes are expected to compound the natural vulnerability of the NCC development, said assistant professor Ony Martinez, also Ortega’s coresearcher.

For one, Aranguren, Kalangitan, Maruglu and Anupul—
areas covered by the NCC development—are highly susceptible to landslides and flooding.

To determine this, the team overlaid the NCC development plan over the five-year flooding and landslide hazard maps by Project Noah of the Department of Science and Technology and the Mines and Geosciences Bureau.

To be fair, NCC is not claiming to be climate change-proof, as Dizon noted.

But “what kind of resiliency is the BCDA trying to build in this aggressive development, which clobbered the communities’ environment?” Martinez said.

Business-centric
And there have been casualties. In May, three young children were discovered dead in a pond that formed in a quarrying site for the NCC project.

“You’re really changing the ecosystem and expecting that it would not have an impact on the surrounding area,” Ortega said. “It’s a schizophrenic development. You’re trying to develop a green city but you’re removing the green.”

What’s clearest from the NCC development is that it remains business-centric, with little to no input from the people who cultivated the land, he said.

Those at most risk are the Aeta, already the most displaced group in the country, whose living conditions and food security are threatened by this development.

Dizon said the BCDA had met with an Aeta group accredited by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) every month to make sure they “were not excluded from this development.”

Part of their demands were access to water and roads, and for the BCDA to build schools in the community, he said.

Dizon also issued the assurance that no ancestral domain would be affected by the development, per the NCIP.

But this technicality masks the development’s blind spot: the people whose stake in the land transcends state records.

Source: newsinfo.inquirer.net

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Long-distance triathlon returns to the Subic Bay Freeport with this year’s edition of Bike King TRI 2 on July 7.

Hailed as one of the toughest triathlon courses in the country, Bike King TRI 2 will see triathletes swim for 2 kilometers at the pristine waters of ACEA Subic Bay, followed by cycling for 60 kilometers along the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway (SCTEx) unimpeded by cars. The final test of endurance is the 15-km run, which includes the hills of Cubi Point.

At stake in the event supported by Biogenic Alcohol, Klean Athlete Nutritional Supplements, Apollo Petroleum Jelly, NLEX-SCTEX Metro Pacific Tollways, Standard Insurance, Smart, official timing partner Garmin, hydration partners Pocari Sweat and Sip Purified Water, ACEA Subic Bay, the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, Court Meridian Hotel & Suites, and Subic Holiday Villas, are specially designed trophies for all Top 3 Male/Female age-group champions, relay team and team competition winners.

Close to 450 athletes have registered for the event, which includes contests for individuals, team relay (all-male, all-female and mixed) and the popular team competition, which has attracted several sports clubs vying for honors. The awarding ceremony will start at 11 a.m.

Bike King TRI 2 is organized by Bike King, which has lined up other multisport events for the rest of the year such as the Vermosa Sports Hub Aquathlon 2 on Aug. 25, the Alviera Duathlon on Sept. 8, the Sun Life Aquathlon Series Championship on Oct. 13 and the MediCard Sprint Tri on Nov. 10.

For more information on how to join, visit http://www.bikekingphilippines.com or send email to registration@bikekingphilippines.com.

Source: manilastandard.net
Photo Source: bikekingphilippines.com

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