Mindanaotoday.com | 69 LGUs in NorMin need evacuation centers
By: Uriel Quilinguing
Antonio Sugarol, OCD-10 regional director, disclosed this in a forum at SM City Cagayan de Oro Uptown mall on Friday, July 8, to drumbeat disaster resiliency among local governments.
Every province, city and municipality, he said, must have evacuation centers (ECs) primarily for persons displaced during natural and man-made calamities, but he did not enumerate where these ECs are.
Often, schools, covered courts, gyms and even churches serve as temporary shelters for evacuees, in the absence of local government-owned buildings intended to house evacuees.
Sugarol said these 29 evacuation buildings have also been utilized as warehouse facilities for prepositioned food and non-food items.
Once face-to-face classes resume this school year, school activities would not be hampered by evacuees in the campus – in the event of natural and man-made disasters, if all local governments in the region have functional ECs.
Man-made disasters include fire incidents and armed conflicts, while natural disasters are flood, landslides, earthquakes, storm surges (tsunami), and even volcanic eruptions.
In the same forum, Delia Maravillosa, who heads the Department of Social Welfare and Development 10’s disaster response and management division, said they have prepositioned 15,830 “family packs” consisting of food and survival items.
Of this, 3,245 “family packs” are in DSWD-10 regional warehouse (for Cagayan de Oro and Misamis Oriental), 9,585 in Iligan (Lanao del Norte), 1,000 in Oroquieta (Misamis Occidental), 1,000 in Camiguin, and 1,000 in Bukidnon (Maramag and Malaybalay warehouses with 500 each).
Maravillosa said they are mandated to stockpile – at any given time – 20,000 packs of food, hence they have requested for augmentation out of their P41-million budget allocation for relief assistance.
DSWD-10 is the vice-chair for disaster response in the Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (RDRRMC), the executive director of which is the OCD-10 regional director.
In the past six months, the DSWD-10 has released close to P72 million worth of relief assistance to over 55 thousand households, including 6,909 families who were affected by typhoon Odette who received at least P1,000 to as much P5,000 each.
The DSWD-10 official said her office would make sure all requests for assistance, with complete documents, would be acted upon within 11 hours and 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, Mylah Faye Aurora Cariño who, as National Economic and Development Authority-10 regional director, sits in the RDRRMC as vice-chair for rehabilitation and recovery said their tasks are not solely on post-disaster activities.
Planning for rehabilitation and recovery, she said, start with the conduct of Rapid Disaster and Need Analysis (RDNA) aside from the Post Disaster Need Assessment (PDNA).
Cariño said disasters are setbacks to the region’s economic growth, hence their primary task is to make sure affected local governments and entire Northern Mindanao would be back on track.
This, she said, is similar to the ongoing rehabilitation and recovery plan implementation after an economic meltdown due to the coronavirus pandemic – even if there are still cases and booster shot campaign is ongoing.
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