DANGER LURKS | People in this community at the foot of Mt. Mayon in Camalig, Albay, are warned of the hazard of lahar that may flow down the slopes of the volcano, especially during the rainy season. Government teams on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2023, met here to plan the search and rescue operation for passengers of a Cessna plane that crashed near Mayon’s crater summit a day earlier. (File photo by MARK ALVIC ESPLANA
LEGAZPI CITY, Albay, Philippines — As weather conditions improved on Tuesday, search and rescue teams were allowed by disaster response officials in Albay province to climb Mayon Volcano to reach an area near the summit crater where a missing plane was believed to have crashed on Saturday.
About 50 local mountaineers and members of government and private rescue teams started the ground operation at 10 a.m. from Barangay Anoling in Camalig town to reach the gully where the Cessna wreckage was seen by a government team tasked to do an aerial search on Mayon.
Tim Lawrence Florece, information officer of the municipal government of Camalig, said the aerial team of the Philippine Air Force’s Tactical Operations Group 5 (TOG 5) was also on standby to airlift the next batch of the rescue team to the identified drop-off point along the slopes of the 2,463-meter-high volcano.
“This will lessen the burden of rescuers, and [they will] not get tired of walking along the steep grounds,” Florece said, adding that each rescue team would be airlifted in batches.
Albay Gov. Edcel Lagman on Tuesday ordered an intensive air and ground search operation to hasten the search and rescue.
“The province cannot afford to prolong the agony not only [of] the families of the missing passengers but also [of] the rescuers and volunteers,” he said in a statement on Tuesday.
First stop
The debris of the Cessna RPC340 was located some 350 meters (1,148 feet) from the volcano’s summit crater on Sunday afternoon. The condition of the pilot, Capt. Rufino James Crisostomo Jr.; his mechanic, Joel Martin; and their two Australian passengers, Simon Chipperfield and Karthi Santhanam, had yet to be determined as of Tuesday.
CAREFUL PLANNING | Members of rescue groups from Albay assess the conditions at Mayon Volcano on Sunday, Feb. 19, 2022, as they start planning the operation to reach the gully where the wreckage of the Cessna plane was seen by an aerial search team. (Photo by MARK ALVIC ESPLANA)
Cedric Daep, chief of the Albay Public Safety and Emergency Management Office, said that as of their 5 p.m. monitoring, two teams of responders, including a group that came from Barangay Mi-isi in Daraga town, were already halfway to their destination, reaching the 914-meter (3,000-feet) mark of the trail.
Daep said these groups would set up camp there on Tuesday and continue the ascent early Wednesday. He, however, could not say what time the rescue teams would reach the crash site.
He said some members of rescue teams were transported to the area on a helicopter from the TOG 5. Two more attempts to airlift two batches of responders had failed because of the heavy clouds on the slopes of the volcano on Tuesday.