Pantukan landslide a disaster waiting to happen—Phivolcs

MANILA, Philippines—Thursday’s landslide that struck a mining community in Pantukan, Compostela Valley and killed dozens of people was a disaster waiting to happen, said the director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology.

After analyzing the topography of the disaster area using maps, Renato Solidum said the conditions that make it vulnerable to landslide were present—steep slope, rugged land, poor vegetation, among others.

Add to that the fact that the area was being mined by small-scale miners, “destabilized by bulldozing and other activities,’’ and wracked by existing fissures, Solidum said in a phone interview Friday.

“You’re just waiting for the trigger,’’ said Solidum, a geologist.

The landslide that buried a cluster of shanties in Barangay Napnapan early Thursday, killing at least 25 residents, had been blamed on incessant rains spawned by low pressure areas in Mindanao the past week.

Solidum said the residents in Compostela Valley should be educated that landslides could happen immediately after a heavy rainfall or a strong quake, or a combination of both, or after days of rain.

“If the weather is clear, they should not assume that there’s no danger,’’ he said.

Solidum explained the difference between a shallow landslide triggered by heavy rain, strong quake or a combination of both, and a deep landslide induced by days of rain.

“The landslide [in Compostela Valley] was a little bit deep. It took some time for water to percolate. So there was a lag time between rain and landslide,’’ he explained. “That is another thing people should watch out for.’’

One example of a shallow landslide, he said, was the one that occurred in Guinsaugon village in St. Bernard, Southern Leyte on Feb. 17, 2006.

Days of heavy rain and two mild earthquakes loosened mountain slopes unleashing mud and boulders into some 3.2-kilometer area, killing more than 1,000 and leaving countless others missing.

In the aftermath of the Pantukan landslide, the most immediate measure would be to move residents away to safer areas, Solidum said.

Even if there was mining in the area, there would have been less problem if the miners stayed in homes away from the mining site, and did not build homes either on the slope or at the foot of the mountain, he said.

“They must exercise their role of making sure that public safety is followed,’’ Solidum said, referring to local officials.

Meanwhile, the environmental activist group Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan PNE) twitted the government for failing to learn its lesson from past disasters and avert the landslide.

“The Aquino administration’s broken-record strategy of blaming small-scale miners has failed to convince them to relocate from Pantukan, despite their leading a very dangerous and hazardous job. They have no choice as the government has given them neither resettlement areas nor livelihood alternatives. [President] Aquino has literally made small-scale mining communities stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Kalikasan PNE national coordinator Clemente Bautista said.