Does your mayor know the town’s geohazards?

Whether he’s old or new in the job, your mayor should know the geohazards in your town or city. That’s his duty. The law tasks him with preparing for floods, landslides, and other adverse geological conditions. If he goofs, and constituents lose lives and property, sue him for criminal dereliction and civil damages.

The Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) gives each mayor at the start of his term hard and soft copies of your locale’s geohazards map. It then convenes them, with the help of the governor, to teach how to read the map. Scaled 1:50,000 centimeters (500 meters), the topography is color-coded. Mayors must pay special attention to the areas shaded red, the most landslide-prone, and purple, the most flood-prone.

(The maps are also in the MGB website: www.mgb.gov.ph/lhmp.aspx. Director Leo Jasareno’s agency is preparing more detailed ones, scaled 1:10,000 cm., for distribution next year.)

Landslides occur due to natural terrain or manmade faults, usually quarrying, mining, or carelessness. Like, the 1999 fall of Cherry Hill Subdivision down the mountainside of Antipolo, Rizal, that killed 59 persons and injured 32, was the developer and city hall’s fault. The firm had erected 379 houses with weak concrete footings, on steep, unstable slopes, and ignored telling earth slippage that started five months prior. The city engineer had approved the subdivision plan and sloppy construction. Such were basic ingredients for disaster during downpours.

Negligence also caused the 2011 trash-slide in Asin, Tuba, Benguet, in which dozens of homes were crushed and six residents were buried alive. For years the residents had been begging adjacent Baguio City to close down the garbage dump on the shared boundary atop the hill. For, the Solid Waste Management Act already forbade dumping, and cities and provinces were supposed to shift to sanitary landfilling. City hall ignored the law of gravity, and the residents’ pleas. At the height of a typhoon, the dump’s riprap wall gave way, unleashing thousands of tons of garbage onto the village below. The homeowners, with Tuba and Benguet officials, have sued Baguio.

Jasareno recounts the worse case of Barangay Kingking, Pantukan, Compostela Valley. Thousands of illegal cliff-side miners were triggering frequent rockslides onto their own family dwellings below. Two such slides had killed dozens in 2011. Still, they defied orders from authorities to stop. Another slide struck in 2012; more people killed. The local officials had the temerity to deflate the casualty count, even though the stench of decomposing flesh pervaded for weeks from under the rubble. The national government has sued them.

Floods are also mostly manmade. Global warming has caused ocean waters to rise around the Equator, thus threatening coastal villages. Meantime, in- and highlanders clog the waterways with trash, silt, and even construction. A governor in Central Luzon was blamed for destructive rain floods due to fish pens choking the rivers, including by his wife’s family. (I have long been decrying the erection of an apartment row on a creek packed with earth inside Doña Carmen Subdivision, Commonwealth Avenue, Quezon City.)

The MGB recommends to the mayors two options: adaptation or relocation. Either the local execs build floodways, dredge rivers, build strong enough retaining walls and levees, and stop haphazard mining, or they remove their constituents from harm’s way. Jasareno laments that some mayors live by the motto, “To see is to believe”: they wait for disaster to strike before thinking of prevention and mitigation. Such was the case of massive destruction in Surigao, Davao, and Compostela Valley by Typhoon Pablo (international name Bopha) last December. The mayors knew that typhoons, though unusual, already were visiting Mindanao – one had struck only a year before – yet paid no heed to the MGB’s flood and landslide warnings.

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Congratulations: OJ Mariano, awarded outstanding male lead performer in a musical, by the 2012 Philstage Awards for the Performing Arts, for his role in Ballet Philippines’ “Rama, Hari”; and

Atty. Dennis B. Funa, law book author, professor of law, and constitutionalist, on his appointment as Insurance Commission deputy.

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Two of many reactions to my piece, “Lack of experts slowing down government projects” (Gotcha, 21 June 2013):

Ramon Quebral: “The Mines and Geosciences Bureau will lose its senior geologists under the ‘rationalization plan’ that Budget Sec. Abad is implementing. And they say geo-hazards and disaster management are the top priorities? What they do is not what they say. Only six out of 18 supervising geologists will be left. These are experts in whom previous administrations invested by overseas study and training.”

Daniel B. Valdez: “The reason for the dearth of technical experts for infra projects is their underpayment. Probably strict compliance with the administration’s ‘tuwid na daan (straight path)’ worked against the pursuit of the projects. Considerable reduction of perks (commissions, percentages) may have discouraged those entering the government service from the private sector with those in mind. I recall the Makati Business Club suggesting that ‘a little corruption is necessary.’ Although contrary to President Aquino’s view, that may be true. It should be noted that the Anti-Graft Act penalizes only contracts that are ‘grossly disadvantageous to the government.’ What of those which are simply disadvantageous?”

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