Rock slide at Laguna quarry site kills 1, injures 4 others

SAN PEDRO, Laguna, Philippines —A boy was killed while three other boys and a woman were injured when boulders, some bigger than cars, rolled down more than 20 feet and destroyed houses in an old quarry site in San Pedro, Laguna.

The fatality was identified as Rommel Gonzales, 4, while the injured were identified only as Dang Navarro and her sons, Nonoy, 11, and Loloy, 9, and three-year-old Totoy Guerreva, according to Police Officer 2 Michael Uy in a phone interview Saturday.

The injured sustained fractures and bruises and were taken to an orthopedic hospital in Quezon City, he said.

The landslide occurred around 3 p.m. Friday on a one-hectare property in Barangay San Antonio that was an open pit  quarry until it was closed down some 10 years ago.

The victims belonged to families squatting on the property, according to San Pedro Mayor Calixto Cataquiz.

Uy said Esmelida Gonzales, Rommel’s mother, told the police that residents ran out of their homes when they heard the rumbling of the rocks.

“She said she went out of the house and saw the rocks. She tried to go back inside to get her son but a bigger rock had hit their home,” PO2 Michael Uy said in a phone interview Saturday.

The boulder that hit the Gonzales home also destroyed two neighboring houses, all made of light materials.

San Pedro police chief Superintendent Kirby Kraft, in his report, described the rock “as big as a closed Elf van.”

“It was really huge! Bigger than a car!” Uy said.

Police immediately cordoned off the area and ordered some 30 other families to evacuate for fear of  another landslide.

Local authorities believed heavy rainfall earlier this week had loosened the soil.

“Some of them were just really stubborn and instead of evacuating had just moved back a little from the site. They were not supposed to live there in the first place as it was too risky,” Mayor Cataquiz told the Inquirer.

The property belonged to the Ambayecs, an old political clan in San Pedro.

Cataquiz said there was a court order against the illegal settlers, but their ejection had yet to be enforced.

He said the families would be placed under the government’s community mortgage program for relocation to a safer place.