No relocation seen for 6,000 families

SETTLEMENTS like this have been tagged as among the causes of flooding in highly urbanized areas and people living in them are marked for eviction. JOAN BONDOC

CITY OF SAN FERNANDO—The Office of Civil Defense (OCD) is ready to evacuate, not relocate, at least 6,000 families living along the banks of the Pampanga River when the 200-km long waterway overflows during heavy rain, OCD officials said.

Josefina Timoteo, OCD regional director, said the priority is to get people out of harm’s way. “We shall have to evacuate them immediately, not relocate them,” she said.

All the families are squatters and at least 1,800 families have been “tagged,” which means they have been included on a list for priority assistance by local governments and national agencies, said Lerrie Hernandez, chief of the monitoring and evaluation division of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG).

Pampanga Gov. Lilia Pineda and Bulacan Gov. Wilhelmino Sy-Alvarado have asked their provincial disaster risk reduction and management councils to prepare relocation plans for riverbank communities in their provinces.

The Aquino administration has not funded any engineering intervention to ease floods in the Pampanga River Basin, an

Inquirer research showed.

Hernandez said a team from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) is validating the safety of evacuation centers identified by local governments.

A DILG list showed that at least 1,862 villages in the Pampanga River Basin are highly prone to floods.

At least 69 villages are in Aurora, 46 in Bataan, 558 in Bulacan, 493 in Nueva Ecija, 463 in Pampanga, 182 in Tarlac and 51 in Zambales.

Geohazard maps of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and MGB showed that the top 10 areas “highly susceptible to flooding” in the country are Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan, Tarlac, Maguindanao, Bulacan, Metro Manila, North Cotabato, Oriental Mindoro and Ilocos Norte.

The Regional Development Council, the highest policy-making body of the public and private sectors in the region, has endorsed a proposed additional budget of P463.6 million for phase 3 of the Pinatubo Hazard Urgent Mitigation Project of the Department of Public Works and Highways. Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon