The Binaliw landfill tragedy was not supposed to happen. Were we not supposed to have learned from the Payatas disaster in Quezon City? Wasn’t a law passed by Congress to avert a recurrence of the catastrophe?
Payatas was an open garbage dumpsite. After years of indiscriminate dumping, a mountain of garbage emerged menacingly from the site, overlooking the shanties that housed scavengers and their families.
On July 10, 2000, after a typhoon dumped heavy rains in Metro Manila, the mountain broke loose sending an avalanche of mud and waste downhill, burying the shanties and their occupants.
An estimated 300 people perished. Most of them were still sleeping when the rampage occurred.
Several reforms were put in place in the aftermath of Payatas. One of them was the ban on open dumpsites.
Binaliw (the garbage site, not the barangay) was supposed to be a sanitary landfill, not a dumpsite. And it was managed by a reputable private company, not the government nor a fly-by-night operator. So where did they fail? How?
The Binaliw landfill came to being after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources granted it an environmental clearance certificate in 2017 and the Cebu City Zoning Board issued a special land use permit a year later.
However, it started operating only in 2019. Then Mayor Edgar Labella earlier refused to grant it a permit because he feared that it would be harmful to the health of the residents. He eventually relented most probably because the owners, most of whom were prominent businessmen in the city, were able to convince him that the feared health risk has been addressed.
The original owners eventually sold the facility to a company owned by billionaire businessman Enrique Razon but not before it figured prominently in a controversy that has resulted in the filing of criminal cases in court against former top officials of the Labella administration.
They were accused of conniving with the garbage hauler in cheating the city government of millions of pesos through ghost or inflated deliveries to Binaliw. The facility’s operator was saved from prosecution because he refused to participate in the alleged corruption.
Labella must be turning in his grave. The project that he had vowed to scuttle because of the risk it posed to the people had in fact claimed the lives of dozens of them. Not only that, it also became a platform for corruption, according to the National Bureau of Investigation.
The city needs a waste disposal facility. Will it still be the one in Binaliw? That is Mayor Nestor Archival’s call.