The role of local executives

In the gold panning sites of Compostela Valley, the specter of death must be a constant companion.

The most striking feature in the photos yesterday of the landslide survivors in Pantukan, Compostela Valley was the blank, resigned expression on their faces, even as they looked at the dead.

Even in the faces of children, there was no fright. If there was grief, it failed to bubble up to the surface sufficiently to register on faces.

As of 5 p.m. yesterday, the death toll in the landslide stood at 25, with about 100 others still missing.

Photos of the landslide area, provided by the Army, reminded me of the one that hit the village of Guinsaugon in the town of St. Bernard, Southern Leyte on Feb. 17, 2006. In that disaster, all that could be seen, from the large gash on the mountain slope to the valley below, was mud. It didn’t take long before all movement underneath that mud stopped. The official death toll was placed at 1,126.

That mudslide was blamed on 10 days of torrential rains. It took only a minor earthquake of magnitude 2.6 – a temblor hardly felt by people living in a quake-prone archipelago – to trigger that deadly avalanche of mud and rocks.

Those were the days when the country seemed to have zero capability to accurately predict the amount of rainfall. Despite 10 days of non-stop heavy rains, the mudslide caught Guinsaugon completely by surprise. Many of the victims were children in school.

Today the nation’s rainfall forecasting capability appears to have improved slightly, with the acquisition of additional Doppler radars.

In the past days, I distinctly recall reports of weather forecasters issuing several warnings on heavy rains and the possibility of landslides and flooding in many areas of Mindanao. The warnings were widely reported by mass media.

Obviously the warnings were ignored in the gold panning sites in Compostela.

Some quarters might blame the gold panners themselves for ignoring warnings. Landslides, after all, are commonplace in the gold panning area. On Good Friday last year, 14 people were confirmed killed and several others reported missing in a landslide that struck the same area that was hit early yesterday morning.

But the victims yesterday were clawing for their livelihood in the muddy slopes so they obviously weren’t lacking in the will to live, and I doubt if anyone was prepared to be buried in a mudslide. If the risks had been explained to them properly, I think they would have gone along with evacuation for their own safety.

Who should have ordered the evacuation? As in the areas devastated by the cataclysmic flooding spawned by tropical storm “Sendong” last December, fingers point to local government officials.

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After the series of catastrophic floods that killed over a thousand people in several cities in Mindanao late last year, local executives should review their crucial role in disaster preparedness and saving lives.

With strange weather now being experienced worldwide, aggravated by denuded watersheds, everyone must now rethink responses to natural calamities.

Local government executives like to blame weather forecasters for failing to adequately explain the risks involved, or for failing to be more specific in identifying risk areas.

Yesterday the weather bureau said it would start issuing warnings to cover specific areas.

Many of the local executives in the areas hit by Sendong’s floods suffered from complacency. For a long time they thought, based on experience, that their cities and provinces were safe from destructive tropical cyclones and consequent flooding.

Several local executives will have to seriously rethink their policies toward squatters, whose votes they rely on. These squatters are allowed to encroach on private property or build shanties along waterways.

Many of the fatalities in Cagayan de Oro and in floods in Davao several weeks before Sendong lived in shanties straddling rivers and creeks. Weather forecasters could have shouted themselves hoarse about the risks of flooding, but I doubt if local executives would have mustered the nerve to tell those vote-rich communities that they would have to abandon their homes. Instead people would cling to the possibility that PAGASA was exaggerating the risks.

Local government and police officials, including barangay personnel, are required by law to prevent squatting as soon as someone starts trying to set up a shanty. Yet squatter colonies continue to proliferate, returning quickly to waterways as soon as old ones are washed away by floods.

Impoverished constituencies are most vulnerable to patronage politics. They feel no personal or financial stake in seeing to it that public funds are used judiciously, so they don’t mind putting crooked governors or mayors in power as long as the crooks share some of the loot through dole-outs.

There must be an information campaign to make even those who have never paid income tax aware that the value-added tax makes everyone in this country a taxpayer, with a right to demand good government and proper service from the president of the republic down to the barangay tanod.

In the provinces, local executives are also supposed to be in the forefront of efforts to protect watersheds and promote sustainable agro-forestry in communities that depend on forests for their livelihood.

And in the gold panning sites of Compostela, local executives should know enough to keep people away from landslide-prone areas when there are incessant rains.

Perhaps with 25 people dead and 100 more missing, something more than the usual blame game will result from this latest tragedy.