VANTAGE POINT Tourists gather at a viewpoint at Picnic Grove in Tagaytay City to get the best view of Taal Volcano as it spews ash and steam on Jan. 12. —RICHARD A. REYES
TANAUAN CITY—The tourist city of Tagaytay in Cavite province is poised to lose millions of pesos in income, after the government shuts almost all businesses following the heightened unrest and imminent hazardous explosion of Taal Volcano.
In a meeting of the city’s tourism council on Thursday, hotel and business owners agreed to heed the recommendation of the Department of Tourism to “cease operations … until the situation is controlled.”
Should Taal Volcano’s activities continue to simmer down in the coming days, the council, composed of hundreds of business owners involved in operating hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, and leisure parks and farms, said it would reopen the city on Jan. 24, in time for the Chinese New Year.
Big losses
The city government plans to mount a “big event” for the reopening of Tagaytay, according to the minutes of the council meeting furnished the Inquirer.
But for now, business operators are expecting big losses from the shutdown, said Lani Diesta, a farm owner.
“We’re losing big, yes, millions [of pesos]. One establishment earns about P30,000 to P50,000 and that’s just on a slow day,” Diesta told the Inquirer in a telephone interview.
The shutdown exempts convenience stores, groceries and drugstores inside shopping malls. The rest, however, like a popular theme park, malls and restaurants were closed down.
Tagaytay City, with over 200 hotels and lodgings alone, falls within the 14-kilometer-radius danger zone of Taal Volcano.
But Sen. Francis Tolentino, who presided over the council meeting, said the city was not covered by the Department of the Interior and Local Government’s order instructing local governments to forcibly evacuate residents, unlike in the Taal lakeshore towns in Batangas province. Tolentino is a former mayor of Tagaytay.
Currently, Tagaytay houses 4,069 evacuees from Batangas in different evacuation centers, said city disaster response chief, Clyde Yayong.
Aside from Tagaytay, evacuation centers were also opened in the towns of Alfonso and Mendez in Cavite.
No immediate danger Tagaytay’s hotels and restaurants stopped operations hours after the phreatic (steam-driven) eruption of Taal on Sunday, when the volcano spewed steam, ash and smoke. Ash covered eight villages on the eastern side of the city, sending tourists into a mad rush out of the city.
Yayong said electricity and water supply had yet to be restored in some parts of the city.
Cavite Gov. Juanito Victor Remulla, in a separate telephone interview, said the province was placed under a state of calamity to allow the provincial government to release and use its P15-million calamity fund.
“There were not much [infrastructure] damage [in Cavite] but we are housing 15,000 evacuees that we will feed and shelter as long as it is needed,” Remulla said. He said Cavite, though, was not facing “an immediate danger” in case of Taal’s explosive eruption.