Burnham Lake: a giant 'dialysis machine' at work

ou often hear of Burnham Park described in metaphor as Baguio City's "lungs." I agree completely. Without a doubt, this refreshing 5-hectare city block of flower beds, trees and shaded promenades circling round a man-made lake is the most foliated part of the central business district (CBD). It is almost 90% of downtown Baguio's "green footprint."

Almost 90% of the "green footprint" of downtown Baguio
is Burnham Park. It cannot be disputed that it acts as the
city's lungs. You'll be surprised to learn it also acts as its
"kidneys" too. 

   Trees capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and give off oxygen, which is exactly the same gas-exchange process that happens in our lungs. Happily for Baguio, it has many lungs: Camp John Hay, PMA, Teachers Camp, Scout Barrio-Loakan and so on. In fact, the whole area inscribed by South Drive, Outlook Drive, Gibraltar Road, Leonard Wood Road (containing Wright Park and Mansion House) are heavily-wooded areas.

Lake Drive promenade around Burnham Lake is where
Baguio's jogging and walking community burn their day's 
quota of calories to stay fit and marathon- or fun run-ready.

   (Spoiler alert though, in one of my future articles I may raise alarm about how quickly non-Baguio interest groups are working the chainsaw to fell as many of these trees to give way to more residential condominium towers that rise higher, uglier and in growing numbers every year.) 

    Indeed, Baguio is very lucky to have so many lungs all over its body it could be likened to a salamander than can breath through its skin. So the endearing title of "city's lungs" is not exclusive to Burnham Park. Its the prettiest one though but also, to keep the metaphor going, the most heavily-coated with environmental nicotine.

   I've thought about it  for a bit and come to the conclusion that the more appropriate metaphor for this park owes not just to its greenery but the sum total of its little-appreciated environmental function. That metaphor is "giant dialysis machine."

   I realize it's not the most romantic metaphor but one that is totally appropriate. For one, dialysis is a lifesaving procedure. There are over 70,000 Filipinos who are dialysis patients today, among the roughly 20 percent of the population diagnosed with some form of chronic kidney disease. 

If you can rise early enough, you can catch the starting pistol of
many road events, from full 40-km marathons to "do-able" 5K fun
runs, that always start and end at Burnham Park's Lake Drive.This 
one went with a snazzy gimmick, called a Neon run because every
runner wore spiffy neon shirts and were greeted at the finish line 
with a "neon shower" instead of ordinary confetti.

    A dialysis machine takes over the job of a dysfunctional kidney, which in turn does half the job that even healthy lungs can't do. All that lungs do is oxygenate our blood by taking out carbon dioxide. But that is all it can do. Our kidneys are the body's main chemical scrubbers, filtering all other metabolic waste products from the blood. Without kidneys--and in default of them, without dialysis machines--our bodies would quickly turn into a cesspool.

Charming runner and 10K-finisher
Tine Constantino is standing here
at the finish line on Lake Drive
in the aftermath of a "neon shower"
in case you were wondering what
that looked like. Environmentalists
need not get upset, it's only neon-
colored baking flour--totally organic, 
biodegradable and a delightful feast
 for birds, ants and other critters
after the race.

    How does that relate to Burnham Park, especially Burnham Lake? It does so on two levels, physical and psychological (I can hear gasps, but hang on). 

   Before there was a "Burnham Lake" in 1909, there was a City Pond and it did not necessarily arise out of design. It just naturally formed out of pure coincidence. In fact, where Burnham Lake is today there used to be a grazing ground for horses and cattle. These animals provided draft power for the turn-of-the-century covered wagons that Benguet and Bontoc farmers used to transport fruits, vegetables and merchandise to the old Baguio Stone Market. I had the privileged experience of having seen that iconic redstone edifice for at least 3 years from 1967 until it burned down in a dawn fire in 1970. On its place now stands Maharlika Livelihood Center.  

    There is a whole article dedicated to this topic about the old Baguio Stone Market written for the Baguio Midland Courier in its September 20, 2020 issue by a friend of mine, local historian and art curator Erlyn Ruth Alcantara ("Ergs") which I highly recommend. 

   There were no more covered wagons in 1967, of course, the last of them unloaded their goods around the 1930s. But in their heydays, these covered wagons--and yes, they did look like your typical westbound homesteaders' wagons from  an American cowboy movie--would be parked along the creek that ran  the length of now Magsaysay Avenue. There are photographs of them ten or twenty abreast, unhitched from their pack animals and pitched downward in formation like a bunch of  jetplanes on the deck of an aircraft carrier. I couldn't get copyright permission to print them here.  Suffice it to say that even with their draft animals unhitched, these covered wagons still crowded each other around the pre-Charter  plaza grounds (now Malcolm Square) which was their designated "parking area." There were that many covered wagons jostling for space on market day, and each one is pulled by an oxen tandem alongside which rode yet another cowhand ("pajinante") on his own horse. So if there were fifty wagons that arrive on market day, there would be triple that number of draft animals, none of whom are allowed to stand in the plaza.

You can leave your pedometer at home. The city
government is kind enough to post a pre-computed
calorie chart to help the serious walker calibrate
his own calorie burn rate. Distance from Burnham
Park is the yardstick  by which many tourists can
tell if they're up to the challenge of embarking on a 
 self-powered walking tour of the city's tourist sights.

   All the draft animals--horses and cattle--were brought to the area around the City Pond. It was exactly that, a pond, no surrounding levees or other containment. In the hotter summer months, that pond dried up--but not completely. The combined urinary output of hundreds of these animals always ensured a small rancid pool in the middle where it slowly percolated into the Kisad limestone-impregnated soil beneath.

This mini-wharf on Burnham Lake's west shore allows for over-
the-water viewing of koi goldfish. Although the voracious guppies
eat practically anything, feeding is still discouraged and you
can't bring any plastic with you on the deck. Unknown to many,
the lake actually functions as a chemical scrubber slowly filtering,
aerating and fractionally distilling ("fracking") the surface water
runoff coming from all around downtown that pools into the lake.

   That part of Burnham Lake had always been a perennial swamp. All water from the surrounding elevations--Kisad-Legarda on the west, SM-Luneta Hill on the south, Session Road on the east and City Hall-Camp Allen on the north (I'm using all modern names because the original historical names will confuse the present-day sightseer)--drained towards the City Pond. This circular drainoff mixed with that livestock sewage right at that spot where you now row around the present lake on those flat-bottomed boats.  The swamp acted like a giant filter and it helped that this was a treeless expanse at the time, exposed to UV light all day. The pond water underwent a natural "fracking" process (for fractional distillation): ammonia evaporated to the altmosphere, solid particulates sank to the bottom, and water separated from all of these distillates flowed out towards Magsaysay Avenue--through that small creek I mentioned earlier. Literally speaking, that City Pond acted like a natural kidney,

Fast forward to present day, the drainage pattern from the surrounding elevations remains the same which explains why during severe typhoons the first place for floodwaters to rise is Burnham Lake, spilling out knee-deep as far as Sunshine Intersection during that infamous Typhoon Ondoy in 2009.

There used to be real sailboats in Burnham Lake in the late 60s
but with the trees growing around the lake reaching towering
heights wind can no longer blow as well across the lake. The 
sailboats were "in irons" most of the time, that nautical scourge
of being unable to pick enough wind draft to do any decent
tacking and jibbing. So the last sailboat was lifted out of the
water in 1971 giving way to these flat-bottomed swanboats. 

   But you don't have livestock defecating and urinating in torrents towards the middle of the lake anymore. However, until as late as 1985 you still had some raw sewage surreptitiously trickling into Burnham Lake from establishments that would not tap into the main sewer lines--which are relatively new and of limited coverage, one might add. The city government has since earnestly cracked down on  non-piped-in sewerage dumpers, excavating and laying down bigger sewer lines around Burnham Park which they can tap into. Today almost 80% of all water that flows into the lake is pure rain and surface runoff.

    But Burnham Lake still performs its "dialysis function" to this day. All the water that pours into the lake will stay in it for days so long as its 2.4-meter high water mark has not been breached. That's the same height you must clear to drive your car into a carpark--it's the depth of the lake, give or take a few inches for siltation. Do not believe the popular joke that if your paddleboat tips over in Burnham Lake you can wade to shore. In reality, if you're not eight feet tall and don't know how to tread water you can drown. The fact that there are neither life vests aboard these boats or lifeguards on duty is a disaster waiting to happen.  

   If water level rises above 2.4 meters, it will exit through the southeast spillgate in one corner of the lake (near Ganza restaurant) and drain, as it has for centuries, towards Magsaysay creek.

The nemesis of this dying "paper tree" one
of less than fifty remaining specimens
lining both sides of Lake Drive is not some
intractable beetle, weevil or other tree pests,
but humans. Heartless out-of-town tourists
ignorantly peel off paperlike sheets of the 
bark for souvenir, or try to impress their 
equally-ignorant girlfriends by spray-
painting hearts on the treetrunks. 

   Magsaysay Creek? Where is it? You drive on top of it. Running the length of Magsaysay Avenue is a huge underground water channel--a culvert six feet wide and four feet high--that channels all the Burnham Lake spillover--which is the city's total suface runoff, really--dumping it out behind T. Alonzo Street to join the M. Roxas creek into Balili River in neighboring La Trinidad.           Meantime, any water left in Burnham Lake is regularly oxygenated through a high-pressure pneumatic-hydraulic aeration process. Yes, that lovely fountain in the middle of the lake that throws up the water in pretty colors at night isn't just there for aesthetics. This aeration process  helps keep the level of dissolved oxygen in the water high enough to make it livable for marine life so you can enjoy watching all those colorful koi goldfish.  Home aquarium hobbyists use smaller pumps and bubble blowers to get the same result.   

   But that's not all. Remember that most of the water in Burnham Lake is surface water runoff brought by the rains. All air pollutants suspended in the air over downtown Baguio mixes with the rainwater  and dissolves into different compositions of acid rain before pooling in the lake.  There, as the water slowly evaporates, these pollutants--mostly sulfur and aluminum oxides from vehicle emissions--are left behind as weak crystals that sink into the lake's silt bed.  

    Being heavy metals they stay on the bottom to slowly degrade. This means these heavy metal toxins--called "slag"-- do not get carried out of the lake by the spillover flow. They do not make it to the Balili River. They do not get to infiltrate  farm watering systems downstream and therefore, do not end up in your vegetable salad. Long story short, if your coleslaw is slag-free, you owe it to Burnham Lake.

   That's the physical dialysis part. There's no denying that a walk through the tree-lined promenades around Lake Drive goes a long way in detoxifying your frame of mind, too. Something about the serenity of Burnham Park park invites you to smell (but NOT pick) the flowers. There are dedicated regulars who do meditation in Burnham Park. Markedly over the years, a growing number of them were senior citizens so that in 2005, that south-end half-circle block of Burnham Park in front of the Rizal Park--which used to be called the Rose Garden--was renamed Senior Citizens Garden.  

   The mental and psychological "detox" need not be all-passive either, If you can rise early enough, from 5:00 to 8:00 a.m., you can join any number of fitness "flash mobs" that daily congregate around the park to do cardio, aerobics, zumba or traditional tai-chi workouts under the supervision of bubbly, young trainers and coaches from the many fitness gyms scattered around the city.

   Strong mind, strong body--who can argue with that? That is how Burnham Park performs its amazing and totally-underrated natural and psychological "dialysis"  function. The result is scientifically unverified, of course, in part because many environmentalists prefer to waste more time in political dialogue than actual scientific research. But the subtlety of these results comes in full display at any traffic bottleneck anywhere in downtown Baguio.   Many observers have been amazed that  in a typical traffic jam, it is usually the frantic out-of-towners who are busy banging on their horns. Baguio drivers with their legendary calm composure--having "Burnham Park psychodialysis" to thank for it--absolutely hate using their car horns. (all photos copyright 2020 Joel R. Dizon)

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON