Inquirer Bicol correspondent bags Bayanihan Media award

Ma. April Mier-Manjares

NAGA CITY, Camarines Sur, Philippines — The Inquirer correspondent in the Bicol region, Ma. April Mier-Manjares, was recognized during the first Bayanihan Media Awards (BMA) held on Thursday at Century Park Hotel in Malate, Manila.

Mier-Manjares won the BMA recognition for print media journalists (individual category) for her coverage of the Cessna RPC340 crash on Mayon Volcano in February.

Her series of stories about the tragedy garnered the praise of the award-giving body for highlighting the efforts of the volunteer mountaineers who led the search and rescue team through the treacherous terrain of the steep mountainside of Mount Mayon.

The search team was then looking for the passengers of the Cessna RPC340 that disappeared just minutes after takeoff from Bicol International Airport in Daraga town of Albay province on Feb. 18. It was later spotted lodged some 350 meters (1,148 feet) from the crater summit of Mayon Volcano.

Mier-Manjares narrated how the 28-member team — composed of local mountaineers, government rescuers and local guides — braved the bad weather and negotiated steep slopes that put their own lives at risk to reach the wreckage, only to find all the persons on board to have perished in the crash: the pilot, Capt. Rufino James Crisostomo Jr. and his mechanic, Joel Martin, both longtime employees of the Energy Development Corp. (EDC), the largest geothermal energy producer in the Philippines; and their two Australian passengers, Simon Chipperfield and Karthi Santhanam, who were EDC’s technical consultants.

Volunteerism

Bringing down the bodies, secured inside body bags, got solemn as rescuers took all efforts to show respect for the victims, a slow and dangerous descent amid whipping winds, whose remains were being awaited by their kin and the EDC officials on the ground.

The articles got the nod of the Philippine National Volunteer Service Coordinating Agency (PNVSCA), an attached agency of the National Economic Development Authority that organized the BMA, an award that was created “to promote volunteer programs and services in the country to maximize the benefits that may be derived from volunteer assistance and adequately gauge the contributions of volunteers to national development and international cooperation.”

Mier-Manjares was nominated by Bicol University, where she is a journalism professor, for consideration by the Philippine Information Agency in Bicol, which in turn nominated her to the PNVSCA.