MANDAUE City Mayor Luigi Quisumbing declared the old Umapad dumpsite a danger zone, after a soil test revealed methane gas deposits under it that may be combustible.

He recommended yesterday to Vice Mayor Carlo Fortuna, presiding officer of the City Council, that the council make a formal declaration in its next session.

The mayor decided on the declaration after a team from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) reported Wednesday that they had found methane gas deposits under the old dumpsite.

“In their initial test, they saw that the garbage in Umapad went as much as 10 meters deep. Because there were a lot of organic materials that were dumped there over the years, there was a significant amount of methane gas, which can be combustible,” Quisumbing said.

In 2010, a fire broke out in the dumpsite that kept burning for a week before it stopped spreading. The mayor said that the City had taken steps to prevent such an accident from happening again, but that more needs to be done now.

The City closed the dumpsite in Umapad (population: 18,501 in 2015) toward the end of 2017 and planned for three projects there, with the private sector’s support.

Mandaue allocated P120 million for a centralized Material Recovery Facility (MRF). Also on the drawing board is a waste-to-energy facility that may be pursued as a public-private partnership (PPP), as well as a sewage and septage treatment plant that may be developed by the Metropolitan Cebu Water District (MCWD), with support from JICA and the Metro Cebu Development and Coordinating Board.

The mayor said that a JICA team conducted the soil test in late 2017, and informed him recently that they had found not just a garbage heap deep enough to be as high as a three-storey building, but many “pockets of methane gas deposits.”

He said that the chief consultant of the study team urged the removal, as soon as possible, of the methane gas to prevent a fire or explosion.

Fortuna and Architect Aracelli Barlam of the City Environment and Natural Resources Office met yesterday with a team from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources 7 to assess the risk the methane deposits posed and to discuss how best to remove these.

“We will coordinate with DENR-Environmental Management Bureau and the Department of Energy to find the best way to extract and remove the methane gas deposits,” Fortuna said.

As a result of the finding, the City will put off for now its plans to develop the old dumpsite.

“We have no stronger priority than public safety and we will prioritize the rehabilitation of the Umapad dumpsite so it can become a safe zone at the soonest possible time,” the mayor said.