2 fires leave 5,000 homeless, raze gov’t offices

A MONSTROUS fire gobbled up more than 1,000 shanties made of mostly light materials in the coastal village of Isla Verde in Davao City on Friday night. Children, the following morning, wade through debris-filled seawater to scavenge for scrap iron. DENNIS JAY SANTOS/ INQUIRER MINDANAO

DAVAO CITY, Philippines—A huge night fire sent slum dwellers running for their lives and destroyed more than a thousand homes here, officials said on Sunday.

The city’s skyline lit up as firefighters battled for more than five hours against flames that leapt swiftly from one shanty to another in the depressed coastal neighborhood of Isla Verde in Barangay 23-C (village 23-C) on Friday night, witnesses said.

As the fire continued to blaze for hours, hundreds of houses were also burned in the neighboring villages of 21-C and 22-C.

“I’m back to zero. I don’t know how I can recover,” said grocer Norayna Serad, who lost her store and merchandise worth P100,000 that she had paid for with three years’ worth of savings from working abroad.

“Maybe I will need to go back to Kuwait and work as a maid again,” the 28-year-old said as she clutched a half-burnt Koran beside the ruins of her shop.

The blaze was put under control shortly after 1 a.m. on Saturday, but by then, about 5,000 people were left homeless, local civil defense officials said.

Children scavenged for twisted metal and corrugated iron sheets among the ruins to sell for scrap.

“These were houses made of light materials. They were all razed,” said Jimmy Martinez,  an official of the civil defense office for the Davao region.

Some of the houses had rested on stilts that stuck out of the coastal waters, and firefighters said they had difficulty moving through the narrow, winding alleyways between the shanties, he said. More than a thousand families sought refuge at a government schoolhouse that escaped the blaze.

Martinez added that the slum sat on a previously vacant government lot that had been gradually settled by impoverished migrants to the city of 1.5 million people.

The blaze apparently started when an untended candle in one of the houses tipped over in the early evening, Davao fire investigator Ramil Gillado said.

A fisherman’s wife, Gina Salapuddin, watched her husband mark out with string the place where their shanty had stood, as the couple began planning for rebuilding even though they had lost practically all their possessions.

“God will provide,” the 32-year-old woman said.

The affected residents are staying in several evacuation centers in the city. The Bureau of Fire Protection is still determining the total cost of damage left by the incident.

In Tuguegarao City, a five-hour fire gutted a two-story building in the Cagayan provincial capitol grounds in Capitol Hills here on Friday night. The fire destroyed the Kammaranan building, which houses at least nine government offices, said a report of Senior Supt. Gregorio Lim, Cagayan provincial police director.

The fire that started at 9:15 p.m. destroyed the provincial agriculture, human resources management and provincial environment and natural resources offices, which were on the building’s second floor.

It also damaged the provincial veterinary, provincial legal, provincial tourism and provincial information offices. The fire was put under control around 2 a.m. on Sunday, said Ernesto Dulin, chief of the provincial security office.

“The fire spread quickly, mainly due to the thick curtains and sheets of paper inside the offices,” Dulin said. Reports from Melvin Gascon, Inquirer Northern Luzon, and AFP