Victorias Milling Company (VMC) mobilized employees and volunteers in a recent waterways clean-up drive as part of the continuing effort to rehabilitate the Malihao River in Victorias City.
VMC President Linley Retirado said the clean-up was conducted in collaboration with the regional Environmental Management Bureau as part of the celebration of Environment Month to “ensure that our waterways remain clean and safe and also to protect marine life.”
VMC also invited environmental experts to assess and set up additional mitigating measures to ensure that their wastewater treatment facility levels are stabilized, which eradicated the odor caused by the molasses leak last month, a press release from the firm said Tuesday, June 20.
Environmental specialist, Dr. Ram Bautista of the University of the Philippines Visayas, said “the positive impact of this incident is that it has caused VMC to start developing new protocols for molasses tank monitoring and an emergency response plan.”
“The company is now in the course of improving the performance of the wastewater treatment plant to consistently comply with the effluent standards of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and to accommodate and treat sudden increases in organic load,” Bautista added.
VMC recently requested the Sugar Regulatory Administration as a third party monitoring agency to validate and assess their findings and recent tests conducted at Daan Banwa in Barangay 9 and at Avery Bridge, which showed that ambient water quality levels in the river have stabilized.
Results in the report show that upon a series of close monitoring, the water quality has improvement in BOD such that it went below the maximum value of 50mg/L and further decreased when resampled several days after.
BOD is a measure of the amount of oxygen required to remove waste organic matter from water in the process of decomposition by aerobic bacteria (those bacteria that live only in an environment containing oxygen) 50 mg/L is the maximum BOD for class C water. Anything below 50 is within standard, the press release said.
Other findings were also validated by the Victorias City Environment and Natural Resources Office that issued a statement that VMC’s wastewater ponds have been “stabilized”, it added.
The VCENRO team was present during the water sampling at the wastewater plant of the mill, noting that “VMC had effectively controlled the adverse effects of the molasses spill on its wastewater treatment facility and resolved the issue of the foul odor.”*