Read this in The Manila Times digital edition.
ONE of the noteworthy projects — and not in a good way — of the late-stage Duterte administration was the installation, at a cost of well over P150 million and counting, of an artificial beach made of dolomite gravel along a stretch of Manila's Baywalk parallel to Roxas Boulevard. The dolomite beach, which has the appearance and texture of cat litter, was roundly criticized at the time for a number of reasons, some of which were clearly valid. The Duterte administration, for its part, defended the beach as illustrative of its larger Manila Bay rehabilitation efforts, and as being "good for the people's mental health."
My own impression was that a purely aesthetic upgrade is not necessarily a bad thing, but that the timing of the investment in it was irresponsible; at the time, the administration was already pleading poverty with respect to carrying out pandemic response measures. It also seemed that the government may have underestimated how much the beach would actually cost. A bit of research into beach engineering indicated that creating one is not that difficult, but that keeping it intact and in place requires expensive continuous effort. For all that, however, the beach project seemed largely harmless; a bit dubious, perhaps, but probably not likely to cause any real harm.
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