Condo fence, houses washed away in a flash

A WELDER’S shanty by the Mahiga creek in Cebu City was one of seven houses washed away during Saturday’s downpour.

The strong rain,which soaked the ground, also caused the collapse of a 15-foot concrete fence of a newly-built condominium building nearby and an English language school for Koreans in barangay Kasambagan.

“When the rain started past 6 p.m, I heard the wall start to crack. I was about to sleep,” said 52-year-old Renato Bercede in Cebuano. Looking out the window of his shanty, he said he saw the concrete perimeter fence of the condo give way, then collapse. That’s when he jumped out the window.

In the almost 40 years they’ve lived by the river in sitio Paray, Kasambagan and the boundary between Cebu City and Mandaue City, Bercede said this was the first time their shanty was washed away by a flash flood. Kasambagan has been identified as one of the top five flood-prone barangays in Cebu City, aside from Mabolo, Kinasang-an, Labangon and the mountain barangay of Bonbon. Bercede went to the school on Sunday hoping to meet the owner and ask for help because the wall which collapsed, he said, was also the owner’s property and partly to blame for the six affected houses because the wall had a “weak foundation.”

Bercede said the building was erected about a year ago and the wall almost two years ago. (Cebu Daily News is still trying to verify who owns the commercial building which stands out with its bright yellow color in the flat landscape.)

Under the law, no buildings or settlements are allowed within a 3-meter easement of rivers, creeks and other waterways for public safety and proper drainage.

Saturday’s downpour flooded low-lying parts of at least 12 barangays in Cebu City, with neck-deep water entering some neighborhoods which had never experienced serious flooding before. On Sunday afternoon CDN came across ten men in the Mahiga riverbank retrieving the loosened hollow blocks of the collapsed wall and scavenging for roof, plywood, and other house materials. Leon Bercede, 23, said they had been working since 7 a.m.

He said he used a small banca to transport his family when the water level started to rise Saturday night.

The seven small houses that were washed away got stuck about 200 steps away a short distance by a strucuture of MCWD pipes and an i-beam bridge.

More than a thousand families live along this part of the riverbank said Lodi Manuel, 54, who loaned a tent for the flood victims that night.

Renato Bercede said he didn’t sleep a wink until Sunday afternoon as he kept busy trying to salvage belongings that had drifted in the strong current of the flash flood.

His spouse, a housewife, and five children, were unharmed. All they saved was a cooking pot “caldero” and two bags of clothes. With his meager earnings of P300 a day, he said it’s hard to start over again and build a house.

By Sunday afternoon, the flood victims received half a sack of rice from barangay officials, seven tins of canned food and a gallon of water. This was shared among 15 affected families.

They huddled under one tent that night. However, none of them could sleep well, worrying about when the next heavy rain would fall. /Correspondent Michelle Joy L. Padayhag