Driver-survivor thanks God – and seat belt

ONE OF THE HEAVY trucks used in mining operations on Semirara Island in Caluya, Antique province, lies crumpled when a wall of the Panian open pit collapsed last week. NESTOR P. BURGOS JR. / INQUIRER VISAYAS

SEMIRARA ISLAND, Antique —Patrick Morgado is thankful to God—and his seat belt—for his new lease on life.

He and four other workers survived after hundreds of tons of excavated soil and part of the wall of the northern Panian pit of Semirara Mining and Power Corp. (SMPC) collapsed early Friday on Semirara Island in Caluya, Antique province.

Eight workers, mostly heavy-equipment operators and drivers, died while another remained missing in the second major accident at the mining pit in 29 months.

“It could have been me. I was so lucky,” Morgado, 42, who has been driving a 100-ton dump truck for SMPC for 14 years, told the Inquirer. Cascading soil buried the front of the giant truck.

“It was so fast. It happened in just seconds,” the driver said.

‘Bar down!’

An excavator was loading soil onto Morgado’s Truck 205 when he saw the Panian pit’s wall falling around 4 a.m. “Bar down!” he radioed to his foreman, Danilo Bayhon, using the term used by mining workers for a wall slip or collapse.

Bayhon, who is the only one still missing, asked the driver for the location of the accident, but the radio transmission was cut off.

As soil swamped the truck and lifted it almost perpendicular to the ground, Morgado shouted inside the enclosed driver’s cabin: “Lord, help, Lord.” For several seconds, he stayed suspended, his seat belt holding him from slamming into the walls of the cabin.

Sensing no more ground movement, he slowly unfastened his seat belt and got off the truck. “If my seat belt was unfastened, I could have instinctively jumped from the truck when I saw the sliding soil, or slammed inside the truck. That would have been fatal,” he said.

Morgado joined two other workers who got off their vehicles. They stayed for an hour in a safe area before climbing out of the pit by daybreak.

Pain lingers

When the Inquirer came to interview him the next day, Morgado was resting at his house at Phase 4 of the SMPC village. He still feels the pain in his muscles but plans to return to work soon.

A few houses or blocks away, tents sprouted for the wake of those who were buried alive. Families of the missing were agonizingly waiting for word on their loved ones.

One of the dead, Bernie Manrique, 39, an inspector and dispatcher at SMPC, was eagerly anticipating his eighth wedding anniversary. Days earlier, he withdrew P3,000 from his bank account for a romantic date with his wife, Rizza Fe.

“He wanted us to celebrate our anniversary with a drinking and ‘videoke’ session here in our house,” Rizza Fe told the Inquirer.

He told her that he had already readied three Filipino love songs, including “Ikaw” and “Hanggang,” to sing during their date.

‘Pancit’ for birthday

The day he went to work, Manrique even joked that she should remarry in case he died. “I laughed but chided him for making fun of that,” Rizza Fe said.

Manrique’s remains were recovered about 10 a.m. on Friday. “It’s so painful and hard to accept,” his wife said, who sat beside his coffin.

Generoso Talaro wanted to eat “pancit” (noodles) on his 53rd birthday on Saturday. He was found dead in the morning that day near the excavator he operated.

Even in grief, his family prepared his preferred dish, according to his eldest child, Joefil.

Ian Catulay, 38, and his common-law wife Jenny, 30, planned to wed in civil rites on Monday with 24 other couples. His body was found early yesterday, while that of Noel Penolla was retrieved on Monday.

The mass wedding was canceled as focus is on helping the victims and their families, said Mayor Genevive Lim-Reyes of Caluya town, which has jurisdiction over the 5,500-hectare Semirara Island.

Jenny is at a loss on how to take care of their four children—ages 9, 5 and 3 years, and 5 months old.

A son, Jian, keeps on watching the road in front of their house for signs of his father. “Mama, it’s Papa,” he would say every time a man nears their house.

“I do not know what to do. I’m still nursing our baby. I’m trying to accept that he is already dead,” she told the Inquirer.