750 houses for turnover to Yolanda victims in Bogo

750 houses for turnover to Yolanda victims in Bogo (City Government of Bogo's Facebook)
750 houses for turnover to Yolanda victims in Bogo (City Government of Bogo's Facebook)

NEARLY eight years after super typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) pummeled Bogo City in northern Cebu, residents who lost their homes to its fury will finally be able to put the past behind them and start anew.

A total of 750 free housing units in Barangay Banban are now ready for distribution to beneficiaries who were victims of typhoon Yolanda, Bogo City Mayor Carlo Jose Martinez announced Monday, Sept. 27, 2021, on the town’s Facebook page.

The turnover of the housing units from the National Housing Authority (NHA) would be done in the coming days.

Each housing unit measures 40 square meters and has its own comfort room and electricity and water connection.

Besides those comforts, the residents of the 5.83-hectare development called St. Vincent Ferrer Homes 1 would also get to enjoy facilities like a basketball court, volleyball court and, in the future, a daycare center.

Aside from those who lost their homes during the 2013 typhoon, other beneficiaries of the homes would be Bogohanons who used to live in accident- and calamity-prone areas like coastal areas and landslide-prone areas and flood-prone areas.

Martinez said that on becoming mayor in 2016, he discovered that there were no concrete plans yet for any housing project three years after the typhoon had devastated the town, whereupon the local government set to work to change that.

It immediately encountered many problems beginning with the search for a good site for the housing development. He said they were lucky to find a site in Banban.

But there was still the problem of the bad road from Barangay La Paz to Barangay Banban which, he said, had now been rectified with its cementing.

After this, Martinez announced, the local government would work on the road from the school in Banban going to the NHA housing site, connecting to Barangay Batad in San Remigio town.

The mayor said now that the housing project that began in 2018 had been completed, he hoped it could lead to more development in Barangay Banban.

When super typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines on Nov. 8, 2013, it struck nine regions.

In Cebu, the towns in the north were the worst hit.

A month after the storm, it was determined that about 31,000 families who lived within the no-build zone (all areas within 40 meters from the shoreline) would need to be relocated in the 15 towns and one city in northern Cebu that Yolanda struck harder than the rest of the province.

These were Sta. Fe, Bantayan, Madridejos, San Francisco, Poro, Tudela, Pilar, Daanbantayan, Medellin, San Remigio, Tabogon, Tuburan, Tabuelan, Borbon, Sogod and Bogo City.

The NHA also identified over 103,000 families in Cebu whose houses had been damaged or destroyed.

Five years after the storm, on Nov. 8, 2018, the NHA Central Visayas revealed that it had been tasked to build 1,500 houses in Bogo City for the typhoon’s victims but that it had yet to build a single one of those houses. (CTL)

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