BATANGAS CAPITOL, Philippines  — “Task Force Taal Lake,” created by Governor Vilma Santos Recto to mitigate fish kill incidents in the province, announced Friday having cleared the lake of 388 illegal fish cages.

The four-day operation carried out in Talisay, Laurel, Agoncillo and San Nicolas towns saw the removal of a total of 397 structures, including nipa huts and bamboo rafts, in the lake’s fish cage zone. The coordinated undertaking, with no less than 16 boats used  to search the lake, resulted in the clearance of Laurel’s municipal waters of illegal structures on  June 16, as per on-site inspection of the task force team assigned to the area.

The town of Talisay had the most number of dismantled fish cages without permit, with 179, followed by San Nicolas, Agoncillo and Laurel, with the elimination of 96, 84 and 29 structures, respectively. The campaign for the destruction of the illegal fish cages were the confiscation and tearing down of three oversized circular fish cages made of Polyvinyl chloride or PVC pipes at Barangay Buso-Buso, Laurel, with a circumference of 12 meters, that reportedly cost hundreds of thousand pesos each.

On June 17 and 22 crackdowns in Talisay’s Sitio Tabla and Sitio San Isidro in the volcano island that netted 58 and 62 illegal cages, respectively.

The multi-agency task force, as per strict orders from Governor Vilma Santos Recto and task force chair Victor Reyes, intends to continue clearout activities until the lake is free of fish cages without permits.

Uncontrolled proliferation of fish cages had been pointed out as among the causes of water quality decline and pollution in Taal Lake. Hence, it has been among the priority measures of the Santos Recto administration since 2008, when the lady governor initiated the creation of the task force that has, through its continuous operations, drastically reduced fish cage population in the lake and Pansipit  River from about 14,000 to its present number of about 6,200.