Trapped in flood by collapsed wall: 6 in family drown at home

Six people from a single family drowned yesterday morning in their own home when a 20-meter slab of a concrete wall collapsed and trapped them inside raging floodwaters from an overflowing creek.

The dead were Prescilla "Precy" Balagapo, 35 and her children Frealla Ann, 7, Fritzie Joyce, 6, and Alfredo III, 3; Abigail Balagapo Familiara, 24; and Elsa Gocela, 38. They lived in an apartment beside the Sindulan Creek in barangay Mabolo, Cebu City.

Prescilla's husband, Alfredo, 35, a native of Novaliches, was spared the tragedy as he was in Bohol working as a sales representative of a canning company.

The fate of the victims was only discovered at 8 a.m. yesterday when neighbors noticed that the door leading to the unit occupied by the Balagapo family was blocked by the collapsed concrete wall. There was a very heavy downpour in Cebu City the night before.

Co-employees of Alfredo in Cebu went to the site of the freak accident on his request to see if his family was all right and it was they who broke the bad news to him.

The apartment was owned by Vicente Gallarse and the dead had been his tenants for over a year.

Gallarse said he thought the Balagapo family had left for safer ground because of the heavy rains since the creek has a habit of overflowing its banks during heavy rains.

The wall that stood over six feet tall fenced off an adjacent property owned by the Villarmia family. It eventually collapsed around 2 a.m. as the floods eroded the ground on which it stood.

"Two walls of the Villarmia family collapsed due to the floods at Sindulan Creek, blocking the main door that led to the apartment of the Balagapo family, preventing their escape when the floodwaters rushed into the house," Mabolo barangay councilor Rey Ompoc said.

When he learned of the tragedy, Alfredo rushed to Cebu only to find the bodies of his loved ones already at the Cebu City Medical Center.

"I was able to talk to Prescilla by cellphone and I told her to take care because it was raining heavily. I did not realize that it would be the last time I would be able to talk to her, " a teary-eyed Alfredo told TV Patrol Cebu about his last phone conversation with his wife late the other night.

Members of the Cebu City Disaster Coordinating Council earlier actually checked the Sindulan Creek after the wall of the Villarmia family collapsed but did not realize that anyone had been hurt or placed in jeopardy.

"We did not know that there were people trapped in the apartment. When we came the wall already collapsed and people said everything was ok," according to CCDCC member Warlito Matulak.

Alfredo is reportedly studying whether to file charges against those responsible for the death of his family. He blames local government officials for not addressing the problem at Sindulan Creek where shanties and a motel block the flow of water.

Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmena yesterday sent an engineering team to check the situation at Sindulan creek.

"The Sindulan Creek is very small and there are many shanties that at the soonest time should be removed in order to widen the waterway," assistant city engineer Kenneth Enriquez said.

The Cebu City Council yesterday declared sitio Sindulan in Mabolo under a state of calamity.

Councilor Gerardo Carillo, who sponsored the resolution making the declaration said this was necessary so that calamity funds can be released immediately.

Carillo said the city government will also be giving P10,000 in financial assistance for each of the victims to the surviving relatives .

Osmeña admitted there is no immediate remedy to solve severe flooding in the city, especially from an unusually heavy downpour like the one that happened the other night.

The city has a pending plan to construct mini dams to catch rainwater in the uplands to prevent them from rushing down to the city but there is yet no budget to start construction.

Figures from PAGASA showed that the rains of the other night were equivalent to 4.5 percent of the annual average rainfall in the city.

"Even if you build a drainage five or six times bigger than the present, it might not solve the problem. We don't have a cure for it. We'll do our best to alleviate it," Osmeña said.

The best solution to the problem, the mayor said, is a long-term plan to build a "river" directly connected to the sea as an outlet of floodwater from the city proper. - with Garry B. Lao and Joeberth M. Ocao/NLQ