Mathay admin liable for Payatas landslide

Belmonte: City to compensate victims

QUEZON CITY, Philippines — A Quezon City regional trial court has found the Quezon City government liable for the 2000 Payatas dump landslide that left over 200 people dead.

In a 133-page decision dated Oct. 30, 2019 but released yesterday, acting Branch 97 Presiding Judge Marilou Runes-Tamang found the city government under then mayor Ismael Mathay as civilly responsible for the deaths, which occurred when a wall of garbage collapsed and buried houses of informal settler families living near the dump.

She ordered the city government to pay the plaintiffs – legal heirs of 56 victims –P110,000 each in temperate, moral, and exemplary or corrective damages, for a total of P6.1 million.

The judge also ordered the city government to pay the plaintiffs P100,000 in attorney’s fees.

“The city would be happy to compensate the victims,” Mayor Joy Belmonte said in a phone interview yesterday.

“It is not true that we will file a motion for reconsideration. There will be no appeal,” she added.

Belmonte said they will source the money from the funds of the office of the city mayor.

She said they would no longer pursue those found responsible for the incident, noting that Mathay died in 2013.

Tamang said “crushing proof” of the government’s “gross negligence in the management and operation” of the dump is the mountain of trash formed through the improper and irresponsible dumping of waste.

She noted that prior to the landslide, the plaintiffs or their parents were relocated from different parts of Quezon City to Lupang Pangako in Payatas in the 1990s by the city government under then mayor Brigido Simon.

However, a portion of the lot near Lupang Pangako was used as a dump by the city government. The “mountain of garbage” drew nearer to the relocation site and eventually collapsed on the relocated families’ homes, Tamang said.

While the judge upheld the city government’s liabilities, she dismissed the case against Tofemi Realty Corp., Meteor Co. Inc., Ren Transport and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA).

Tamang said the plaintiffs failed to prove that the MMDA exercised control, supervision and management over the dump.

She said Tofemi and Meteor were limited to owning the lot leased to the city government as a dump while Ren Transport is just one of the garbage haulers that utilized the dump.