CEBU CITY—Theater operators in Cebu City have agreed to conduct a thorough inspection of their establishments after a defective water sprinkler was found to have caused the collapse of a portion of the ceiling of an Ayala-owned theater on Monday night.
Mayor Michael Rama met with the cinema operators behind closed-doors on Wednesday.
“It was agreed during the meeting that they will have their engineers check their sprinkler systems and other safety devices to prevent a
repeat of what happened to Cinema 5 at Ayala mall,” said Councilor Dave Tumulak, who is in charge of the city’s command center.
Those who came were representatives of Ayala Center Cebu, Country Mall Cinema and Oriente Theater.
Dreamscape Networks, a business process outsourcing company, was holding an event inside Cinema 5 at the new wing of Ayala Center Cebu past 8 p.m. on Monday when water suddenly poured from the ceiling. A minute later, the acoustic board on the upper level of the cinema collapsed.
At least nine persons were hurt, most of them suffering cuts in the body.
Tumulak said the city’s Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council would meet with the theater operators’ emergency response teams separately and require them to submit their emergency plans to the city.
“We need to come up with a protocol in emergency responses,” he said.
Mark Evans, Dreamscape Networks chief executive officer, had earlier complained that it took security guards 25 minutes after the accident to arrive at the area.
“The emergency response was zero. It was so embarrassing. No one knew what to do. So we, ourselves, began to pull people out. And the steel frames were all over,” Evans said. He vowed to sue Ayala over what happened.
On Tuesday, Rene Cerwin Luarez Ong, operations manager of the Australian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, went to the Mabolo police station and had the incident recorded as a case of reckless imprudence resulting to multiple physical injuries. Doris C. Bongcac, Inquirer Visayas