LEGAZPI CITY --- Equipped with expensive gears and empty sacks as garbage bags, scuba divers in the province and their children scoured underneath seawaters to clean up corral reefs along Albay Gulf and Legazpi Bay here. The “scuba basurero” who serve as undersea metro aids are members of the Bicol Scuba Divers Foundation, Inc. The members come from the city’s respected families, prominent businessmen, retired police officers and public officials who have volunteered to clean up the gulf and the bay and preserve and protect the environment and marine resources as a “gift” to future generations.

        Ramon Tomas, 53, president of the Bicol Scuba Divers Foundation Inc., along with his wife Agel and two lovely daughters Trixie, 18, second year college of the Ateneo De Manila University taking up BS Bio, and Gianina, 15, third year high school student of Aquinas University Science High School in this city dived and swam together to retrieve tons of waste materials which are threatening the maritime habitat in the bay.

        As undersea metro aides, these divers are each equipped with 40-kilo oxygen tank, breathing regulator, fins, face mask, lead weights and empty bags or sacks as they picked rubbish beneath the sea.

        Tomas told Bicol Mail that he started scuba diving in l978 and continues to do so, this time with his entire family to clean up the endangered corral reefs.

        He said the corral reefs three decades ago were undisturbed and well-endowed and marine life was abundant.

        The divers group along with other members of the Philippine Navy scoured the Pulang Buya (Denson Reef) of the Legazpi Bay area and found empty bottles and various kinds of plastics polluting the sea bottom and the corral reefs “that are now virtually dead”, according to retired Tabaco Police Chief Supt. Ronnie Victoria.

        Victoria, a native of Rapu-Rapu island town, also blamed rampant illegal fishing as serious threat to the deteriorating marine life. “We’re calling on the city government to take action immediately to rehabilitate the corral reefs and enact laws that will protect the Legazpi Bay area,” Victoria said.

        He said that the divers themselves could attest to the alarming condition of corral reefs in Legazpi Bay and that it would take several decades to restore them.

        “The corral reefs in Albay Gulf particularly in Legazpi Bay are almost destroyed due to illegal fishing practices as well as unabated disposal of waste materials along the shores that are ultimately swept into the sea,” he said.

        For every dive they make to clean up the ocean bed, their lives are put to risk, according to Bing Gonzalez, 43, owner of Chick’en Restaurant here who suffered vertigo and ear rapture that caused permanent minor hearing loss after joining the clean up drive two years ago.

        “But it was a different world, so serene and relaxing while swimming with the fish,” Gonzalez said of her experience underneath the sea as one of the members of the divers group.

        Councilor Chito Ante, a member of the city council’s Marine Aquatic Resources Committee, said the city government is crafting an ordinance that will prohibit all forms of fishing activities except the traditional and harmless line hook fishing practice.

        Ante who was also a member of scuba divers foundation added that they are also mulling to declare Legazpi Bay as marine reserve to protect the area from further deterioration brought about by illegal fishing and the indiscriminate disposal of garbage into the sea.


SEAWATER METRO AIDES. Members of the Bicol Scuba Divers Foundation Inc. in Albay scour Legazpi Bay for waste and garbage to clean up the endangered corral reefs underneath. The condition of coral reefs and sea bottoms in Bicol, according to the divers, have also been hopelessly deteriorating because of unchecked rampant illegal fishing, the most notorious of which are cyanide and dynamite fishing.

RHAYDS B. BARCIA