Vulnerable

Urduja, Vinta and the NCCC fire underscore what we already know. The country is vulnerable to natural calamities and man-made disasters.

There are many reasons that make us vulnerable. We astride the Pacific “ring of fire” making us susceptible to quakes and volcanic eruptions. We sit on the path of typhoons spawned in the warm ocean.

In addition, the archipelago is overpopulated. With small plains and little land between mountains and seas, overpopulation pushed communities to settle in hazardous zones where flash flooding and landslides are likely.

We have had a weak state with a poor record at regulating human settlements and enforcing building codes. Our cities proliferated with very little urban planning. Substandard construction materials easily make their way to the market.

The weak state is also to blame for the massive denudation of our forests. In a century, we managed to lose over 90 percent of the archipelago’s forest cover. The denudation exposes downstream communities to landslides and imperils our fresh water supply.

Add to all these the reality of climate change, producing even more extreme weather. Typhoon Yolanda was the most powerful typhoon ever to make landfall. It may not be the last.

Many years before, we saw a spate of shipping disasters. We saw another one off the coast of Quezon last week. This, too, is the result of weak governance.

Our attitude toward domestic shipping is exactly the same as our attitude toward jeepneys: the vested interests (ship owners and jeepney operators) so easily bully government from enforcing stricter safety regulations.

Considering the volume of people traversing the islands using ferries and ships, our domestic shipping is not compliant with international classing standards. Very few conform to the requirement for having ships double-hulled. Too many are actually floating coffins: substandard vessels prone to every sort of maritime disaster.

A nation of over 7,000 islands, we have a seriously undermanned Coast Guard. We do not have enough assets and men to police all our ports and sequester vessels when a no-sail alarm is raised. We do not have enough vessels equipped to fight fires when they break out on ships or to quickly deploy for search and rescue when an accident happens.

The NCCC mall in Davao is apparently unsafely designed. Yet year after year it was able to get the certifications required to continue operating.

I recall the UP Faculty Center that served as my second home for decades. Everyone knew it was a firetrap. Yet it continued being used after some semblance of a fire escape was installed. Fortunately, when that structure burned down, it was in the early morning hours and the place was empty.

The fire demonstrated exactly why it was called a firetrap. Tons of paper, books and manuscripts, caught fire very quickly. Many lifetimes of research, artifacts and rare documents were lost in that fire. One shudders at the thought of how many might have died if the fire broke out in the middle of a working day.

 We have an agency with a cumbersome name: National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC). That cumbersome name thinly veils its institutional weakness. It comes to life mainly to coordinate responses after a disaster has happened. It is better named a disaster rescue and relief agency.

Because of all the vulnerabilities mentioned above, we need to elevate public safety into an all-of-government concern. We need a super-agency that enforces safety codes on buildings and transport, regulate settlements in hazardous zones and forcibly relocate those already sitting in calamity-prone areas.

If a super-agency is not feasible, we could at least articulate a comprehensive public safety policy. That policy should guide the various departments and all the local government units. It should mandate continuing public education to make our people deeply conscious of our vulnerabilities.

The media campaign that has been going on about what to do in the event of a major quake and the drills regularly called for the purpose is a fine example of what we can do on a broader scale. Project Noah did a good job of identifying hazardous zones. Unfortunately, that project was terminated before it could preach the gospel of public safety to the smallest political units that constitute the real frontlines in the face of calamity.

The public should demand a more robust safety program. The first duty of government is to ensure the safety of its people.

We should push for a program for dismantling unsafe structures and phasing out unsafe vehicles. It might, at first blush, be costly. But it will save lives.

For instance, I could not imagine why, in a typhoon-prone country, we have allowed giant billboards to proliferate. They are not only unsafe, they are an eyesore.

We should hurry up the program to replace the jeepneys with more ecological and more safely designed vehicles. The jeepney phase-out should have happened when we enacted a seatbelt law. But instead of being phased out, these monstrosities were exempted.

We saw from that tragic accident in La Union how deadly the jeepney’s design could be. Its passengers are totally unprotected in the event of a collision.

I know of a woman who lost both her legs while boarding a jeepney when another one crashed from behind. How could we have allowed for so long a public transport that load passengers from behind and not from the side?

True, this may be an icon of our culture. But it is really an icon of the worst features of our culture, those that aggravate our vulnerabilities.