Asia-Pacific, Environment, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights

PHILIPPINES: Storm-Hit City under Constant Threat of Landslides

Arthur Allad-iw

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines, Nov 17 2009 (IPS) - The storm has long subsided, and the torrential rains—which battered this city known for its pristine charm and stately pine trees last month—have been gone for weeks.

Yet fear still looms large over a community that had lost their homes from the onslaught of landslides that came in the wake of Typhoon ‘Pepeng’ (international code name, ‘Parma’), the deadliest to hit the Philippines’ summer capital in years.

‘Nanang’ (‘elderly woman’) Benita Sar-ayen, 50, said she has no choice but to return to her home—or what used to be—that stood over a small piece of land she had bought with her hard-earned money from buying and reselling used bottles and old newspapers to junk shops. She hopes to rebuild it—and build it she will with the meagre resources—rendered scarcer these days—that she can muster.

Never mind the risks of another deadly typhoon—and landslide—a great likelihood in a country that sees an average of 20 typhoons a year.

Her house was washed away when a massive landslide struck at the height of the typhoon—just moments before she and her family managed to flee with only the proverbial clothes on their backs.

Pablito Manzano, who survived the landslide that rampaged the Kitma area, at least four kilometres from the city proper, is just as resolute as ‘Nanang’ Benita. He said he would rebuild his house in his area, where his neighbors—a family of eight—died when their house collapsed after being hit by a landslide.

Such resolve appears lost on the city government, which, according to Sar-ayen, offers impoverished folk like her no option save for a housing project that she knows she will never be able to afford.

Within the whole Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) in the mountainous areas of northern Philippines, Baguio City—a favorite get-away of local tourists during summer because of its cool climes—registered the second highest number of casualties, numbering at least 60 people, as a devastating series of avalanches destroyed houses, including Sar-ayen’s, in early October.

CAR is the only landlocked region in the country. More than 300 people perished in the region as Typhoon Parma lashed through it, according to the CRDCC.

Data from the city’s social welfare and development office showed a total of 313 houses were damaged during the typhoon, 99 of which were classified as totally damaged. Across the region, some 763 houses were totally damaged and 4,895 were partially damaged, said executive officer Olive Luces of the Cordillera Regional Disaster Coordinating Council (CRDCC).

The highly urbanised Baguio city is no stranger to disasters. Past typhoons and a 1990 killer earthquake had claimed thousands of lives and destroyed millions worth of property.

Baguio is a landslide-prone terrain, says Dr Karlo L. Queano, senior science research specialist at the Land Geological Survey Division of the Mines and Geo-sciences Bureau (MGB), which is under the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. He said it has the basic elements of a landslide-susceptible area: a seismically active region, mountainous environment, degraded lands, frequent periods of intense rainfall—and rapid, albeit not necessarily sustainable, development in select parts of the city.

When there is a higher degree of susceptibility to landslides, as in the case of Baguio City, much of whose landscape bears the footprints of an American colonial area, a higher degree of government intervention is needed to lessen the potential impacts of landslides, said engineer Faye Apil, head of the geology division of the MGB office in the region.

Other measures that could have been adopted by the city are the installation of a drainage system that will catch run-off water to prevent it from causing landslides, Apil said.

None of these are in place, she said, despite their having been among the recommendations presented by the MGB to the city government based on a 2008 study conducted by the bureau assessing the disaster-risk areas in Baguio City.

A fundamental intervention measure is for the local government to disallow the residents to occupy the areas susceptible to landslides, if not to provide a resettlement site where families can safely build their homes, she pointed out. This, too, has yet to happen, she said.

In 2008, Apil’s office embarked on a public awareness campaign on disaster issues affecting the city. But the people showed little interest, she said, since they refused to vacate the landslide-prone sites where their houses stood. The local government took no action either.

Instead of regulating the building of houses and other establishments to ensure the people’s safety, the government is even allowing tall buildings to be erected on sites highly susceptible to landslide, said Apil.

This is also evident in areas like Cresencia Village, located at a gully area complemented by landfill soil, which is at most risk from natural disasters, she added.

Habitation of this site should have been considered in the past before allowing the construction of houses there, many of which were buried under rubble as a result of a landslide brought on by the recent typhoon, said Ignacio Pangket, chairperson of the urban poor group ‘Organisasyon Dagiti Nakurapay nga Umili iti Siyudad’ (Organisation of Urban Poor in the City).

Shortly after the typhoon, Baguio city mayor Reinaldo Bautista, Jr. issued a statement to the media saying the city would draft plans to remove communities from the danger areas. Part of these plans is to allocate housing units for the now homeless residents, payable over a period of 30 years.

But since many of the homeless have no more regular jobs, payment will be a problem for them, said Pangket. “They cannot do that with their paltry incomes,” he said.

A human rights lawyer, speaking to IPS on condition of anonymity, said the city government urgently needed to come up with a comprehensive development plan that would, among others, mitigate disaster impacts.

He said the Baguio Agenda, an output of various sectoral workshops conducted soon after the 1990 major earthquake that hit the city, could have been adopted by the city government as its comprehensive development plan or used it as basis for coming up with its own. “They can start from there,” he added.

But almost two decades after the Agenda was completed, it remains a proposed document for the local government’s consideration.

A check by IPS with the ‘Sangguniang Panglungsod’—the legislative arm of the city government—and the City Research Office showed that the city to this day has not drafted a development plan that would have addressed land use, among others, and prevented the massive devastation wrought by the recent typhoon. In its place is a zoning ordinance, under Resolution No. 52, that provides revised zoning regulations that include “environment development controls.” This is deemed far from inadequate to address the city’s disaster concerns.

Lawyer Jose Mencio Molintas said such a development plan must be urgently adopted and strictly implemented by the city government to dissuade the people from occupying areas susceptible to landslides. Ensuring that they live in a secure environment means recognising their right to shelter, he said.

Making matters worse is a land use system being implemented in the city, which Molintas said, is anchored on a townsite sales application scheme (TSA), where alienable lands are sold by the government to the highest bidder. This system is based on a 1909 city charter that was adopted during the American regime—which ruled the Philippines from 1898 to 1946—where the target was a 25,000-strong city population. Such a scheme effectively deprives the city’s poor residents of a chance to own a piece of those lands.

Baguio Congressional representative Mauricio Domogan has filed House Bill 2813 seeking to amend the 1909 charter, but it does not address the problem of disaster-prone areas.

The TSA is seen as a push factor for informal settlers to occupy the so-called critical areas in a city whose population has ballooned to more than 300,000.

Until a comprehensive plan is in place and apparently flawed systems such as the TSA are corrected, residents like ‘Nanang’ Benita and Pablito Manzano will keep going back to their disaster-risk areas, or insisting on staying there, when these should have long been declared unfit for habitation.