LINGAYEN, PANGASINAN, Philippines—Government workers on Monday dug up assorted drugs and medical supplies worth millions of pesos from a pit inside the provincial engineer’s office compound here.

Buried were antibiotics, anti-TB and anesthesia drugs, contraceptive pills, ascorbic acid bottles, antiseptic solutions, blood bags, intravenous (IV) tubes, condoms and tablets that could no longer be identified, Dr. Jackson Soriano, provincial health officer, said.

“This is unusual because we do not dispose of medicines this way. These could have been used by our needy constituents,” Soriano said.

The provincial government operates a provincial hospital, six district hospitals and seven community hospitals.

Paterno Orduña, executive assistant to Gov. Amado Espino Jr., said that based on a report that Espino received, the medicines could have been buried in 2005 or 2006.

He said it was still too early to determine who was responsible for the disposal of the medicines and why these were buried.

“From the information that we got, a dump truck and a pickup were used to transport the medicines and a backhoe was used to dig the pit, which was about 10 feet deep,” Orduña said.

“Easily, these could be [worth] millions [of pesos],” he said.

Orduña said the medicines on the pit’s surface were burned. But he said an informant had told him that these were hurriedly covered with soil when the vials started exploding.

“We believe that those at the bottom of the pit are still intact and we are going to retrieve them within the week,” he said.

Some of the medicines had expiration dates in 1998 and 2004, Soriano said.

Expired drugs, he said, were usually disposed of by putting them inside vaults in secluded areas. “It is rare that we have expired medicines,” he said.

“If these medicines have expired, we would like also to determine if there were rules and regulations which have been violated in the disposal of government property,” he said.

Some of the IV tubes and condoms were still inside sealed packs.

Orduña, who heads the provincial government investigation team, said it was only on Sunday that he was able to identify the exact area where the medicines were buried.