TACLOBAN CITY, Leyte, Philippines — A decade and a half after it was approved, a major irrigation project in Samar province will finally start to fully irrigate its intended programmed service area by yearend. This was announced by the Samar provincial irrigation officer to reporters Tuesday.

Said provincial irrigation officer, Engineer Amadeo Montejo disclosed that the Basey Irrigation Project, which is Samar’s biggest irrigation project based in the town of Basey, some 30 kilometers east of Tacloban City will be “operationalized to satisfy the water requirements of our farmers for their rice production before the end of 2011.”

Montejo said a P205 million allocation to be disbursed this year will finally complete the project.

He said the irrigation project has already irrigated some 100 hectares of the programmed service area since 2008 after the first test run was conducted in October of that year. The second test run will be conducted at the end of July this year.   

The Basey irrigation project was approved in 1996 with an original proposed budget of P727 million. Such budget cost was however adjusted to the current P1.3 billion due to material and labor costs increments.  

Bugasan River in Barangay Mabini, with its 24-kilometer main canal from the dam that delivers irrigation water to the project site, is the project’s water source. 

Montejo said project had been slow in its implementation due to budgetary constraints. He said, since it was began, there had been years when the project was given from P10 to P20 million only and it was only in 2008 when the project started receiving more substantial allocations from the national government,  allowing project construction to go into full swing mode.   

Montejo informed reporters that the Basey irrigation project is one of the biggest projects given topmost priority in the island of Samar.  The other major priority irrigation projects in Samar Island are located in  Catarman  and Catubig Valley both in Northern Samar, and in Dolores Eastern Samar.