TWISTED steel and bare beams are all that are left of the public transportation terminal in Compostela town, which was one of the areas hardest hit by Typhoon “Pablo.” GERMELINA LACORTE
NEW BATAAN, Compostela Valley, Philippines–The number of missing persons here, many of whom now have slim chances of survival, could actually be more than what is reflected in the list of those who disappeared in the aftermath of typhoon “Pablo,” this town’s mayor said.
“What we have is the list of missing persons as reported by relatives, who were looking for them following the onslaught of the typhoon,” Mayor Lorenzo Balbin told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
But Balbin said the local government learned that there were transients who arrived here to find work before Pablo made landfall and they too might be missing.
“We just don’t know because no one could make a report about them,” he said.
Balbin said to make the list of missing persons, currently nearing 400, as accurate as possible, the local government has been conducting a survey of each family, especially in hard-hit areas of the town, to find out if they have kin or neighbors who remained missing but unreported.
“We don’t want to make guesses,” he said.
Balbin said close to 500 dead victims had already been found and many of them remained unidentified.
“Our search and retrieval operation is still on going,” he said.
As to burial of the recovered unidentified bodies, Balbin said “we will give each a decent burial.”
He said they have constructed a large tomb, where the unidentified dead victims would be interred in individual coffins.
For those already identified, Balbin said their relatives would take care of burying them while the town government will provide them with free coffin and burial assistance.
In Sta. Cruz, Davao del Sur, relatives of at least 33 fishermen, who have disappeared at the height of Pablo’s wrath, have sought the help of local officials in a bid to locate them.
Adelaida Badilla, municipal social welfare officer, said the missing fishermen went out to sea hours before Pablo made landfall in Southern Mindanao.
Badilla said they had started coordinating with other local government agencies to trace the missing fishermen.
In General Santos City, the Task Force Search and Rescue-GenSan told relatives of the more than 300 fishermen–who went missing off Surigao del Norte and Davao Oriental when Pablo made landfall–that the chances of finding any of them alive had become so slim but that its operatives remained in “search and rescue mode.”
“We don’t want to give you false hope, but let’s keep on hoping and praying. The Task Force until now is still in search and rescue mode,” Navy Capt. Lued Lincuna, task force operation officer, told about 100 relatives of the missing fishermen during a debriefing on Monday.
Lincuna said the focus of the massive search and rescue operation is the sea area some 300 kilometers off Davao Oriental, or towards the Celebes Sea and the Indonesian waters.
“The chief of staff of the Armed Forces of Indonesia had given our search and rescue teams a clearance to operate even inside their territorial waters,” he said.
At least 22 boats from the Philippine Navy boats, the Coast Guard, the United States Navy and fishing group are involved in the effort, Lincuna said.
Out of the 372 reported missing in the seas off Surigao and Davao Oriental, so far only 25 had been found, 7 of whom are alive.
In explaining why the number of missing fishermen was so large, authorities said there were 47 fishing vessels composed of mother boats, carrier boats and light boats, which set out to sea from this city before Pablo made landfall. Out of the number, only three vessels had been retrieved.
“On Dec. 17, a US naval aircraft scoured the fishing grounds in the boundary of the Philippines and Indonesia but no sighting of survivor, only floating debris,” Lincuna said.
In Tagum City, the devastation wrought by Pablo to banana and mining industries in Compostela Valley could cause economic ripples in the city, Mayor Rey Uy warned.
Uy pointed out the massive loss of revenue and employment in these sectors, which the city’s economy was quite dependent on.
Tagum gets at least P5 billion in indirect revenues from these sectors annually, represented by purchases banana plantation and mining workers in Compostela Valley make from the city’s businesses, Uy said.
He said city economists had projected that the local economy would shrink by about 30 percent as a result of Pablo’s devastation of Compostela Valley.
“Those from Compostela Valley do their marketing here. Just imagine if that four people could no longer buy needed goods due to the loss of income
of a single worker,” he said. With reports from Dennis Jay Santos, Orlando Dinoy, Aquiles Zonio and Frinston Lim, Inquirer Mindanao