THE exchange of words between City of Naga Mayor Kristine Vanessa Chiong and officials of the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) 7 on the issuance of threat advisories before the killer landslide hit Barangay Tina-an proved what we have been trying to stress all along. Results of threat assessments using monitoring based on advanced technology are valuable and must be utilized fully.
But recent experience shows that how local government units and concerned agencies utilize these advanced data still leaves much to be desired. Beyond issuing two geohazard advisories to the City Government of Naga a month before the landslide, for example, what have MGB 7 officials done?
Chiong denied receiving the two threat advisories and we take her word for that, but if she did receive these, how could these have guided her subsequent actions? Would she have needed advice on how to appreciate fully the import of the advisories and how to come up with specific and effective preparation?
The experience with Yolanda in relation to the Tacloban City Government’s response to the storm surge warnings tends to show problems in the appreciation of available data. Those advisories and even those color-coded maps look dead until proper appreciation of these are done.
It is sad that lives had to be wasted before we learn how to do it right as far as disaster preparedness using available advanced data is concerned. Ondoy became a devastating typhoon because of the volume of water it poured in affected areas, swelling rivers and other waterways and causing killer floods.
After that, rainfall warnings got appreciated better and monitoring of water levels in rivers were being tied to disaster preparedness, like automatic evacuation of people living in flood-prone areas. The loss of lives was thus lessened when other rain-inducing storms entered the country.
Perhaps, instead of exchanging blame, Chiong and MGB 7 officials should instead sit down for a dialogue on how to address the problems posed by quarrying of the city’s mountains by maximizing the use of available data. They can, for example, look again at the geohazard maps and results of inspections and, better still, see the areas for themselves for better disaster risk reduction effort.