The city's Parks and Playground Commission headed by Marietta Ebo has already asked the permission and technical assistance of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to guide on how to safely remove the trees. The DENR officials, however, have not answered the city's query yet.
Kajima Corporation, the contractor of the tunnel project, would be the one to uproot the trees and that it has already hired a Japanese expert, but Mayor Tomas Osmeña would also want to listen first to the opinion of Elmer Santiago, a Filipino environment expert.
The Parks and Playground Commission would want to ensure that the trees survive the trauma after these will be uprooted from their locations. There is a plan that after the completion of the tunnel project, the trees would be returned to their original locations.
The original plan was to dig up from the SRP road near the location of the old Compañia Maritima building that will traverse under the plaza without disturbing its structure.
But the contractor had changed its original plan and instead had dug up a huge canal at the Plaza Independencia to make it easier for them to construct a tunnel. The Japanese contractor, however, has promised to "return the original structure of the destroyed plaza."
"Mga 69 g'yod ka punoan sa lain-laing kahoy ang maapektahan kay maigo man ni sa tunnel," a personnel of the Parks and Playground Commission said.
It was learned that three of these 69 trees - a Mahogany, Jackfruit and Banaba - were already uprooted and were successfully transferred to other locations, but these were not the big ones. - Rene U. Borromeo