Central Mindanao floods displace 30,000

MAGUINDANAO, Philippines -- Government agencies are scrambling to extend relief services to more than 30,000 villagers displaced by floods in North Cotabato, Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat provinces.

Personnel of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division and the Humanitarian Emergency Assistance and Response Team (HEART) in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao were still out until past 3:00 a.m. on Saturday in flooded areas in Pagalungan and Montawal towns to rescue villagers using small boats with outboard motors.

Pagalungan and Montawal, both in the second district of Maguindanao, are dotted with swamps and crisscrossed by large rivers that connect to the 220,000-hectare Liguasan Delta.

Mayor Salik Mamasabulod told reporters early Saturday that floodwaters spread through dozens of barangays in Pagalungan Thursday, inundating rice and corn farms, the municipal government compound and nearby villages.

Peasant enclaves in agricultural areas in the adjoining Kabacan town in North Cotabato and Montawal have also been under water since noontime Thursday.

The acting governor of North Cotabato, Shirlyn Macasarte-Villanueva, told The STAR on Saturday that emergency teams were deployed in flooded villages in Barangays Malabuaya and Kayaga in Kabacan town and in Punol area in the municipality of Pikit to help evacuate villagers.

“The provincial government dispatched rubber boats operated by people from the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council to lead the operations in the two towns,” she said.

The flooded towns in central Mindanao’s adjoining Maguindanao, Sultan Kudarat and North Cotabato provinces are near the 220,000-hectare Liguasan Delta, a catch basin for many rivers that spring from hinterlands in the three provinces and from Bukidnon.

More than 20 barangays in Bukidnon province and in the outskirts of Valencia City there were also ravaged by flashfloods on Wednesday.

The largest waterway flowing downstream into the Liguasan Delta is the Pulangi River that springs from Bukidnon province.

The HEART, operating under the ministerial control of ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman, reported on Saturday that no fewer than 20,000 families were affected by the flash floods in Maguindanao and in Lanao del Sur, also a component province of the autonomous region.  

Brig. Gen. Ariel Dela Vega, commander of the Army’s 6th Infantry Division, said all of their units in towns along the Liguasan Delta have been directed to help evacuate villagers to areas far from rivers and marshes.

Using rubber boats, HEART workers, personnel of the 6th ID and its component units, the 7th Infantry Battalion and the Division Training School, rescued a dozen Moro families from flooded villages in Barangay Bulit in northeast of Montawal before dawn Saturday.

Hundreds of evacuees from interior barangays in Pagalungan and Montawal constructed makeshift shelters along elevated stretches of a national straddling through the two municipalities.

Local officials in North Cotabato’s Kabacan town told The STAR at noontime Saturday that flashfloods also swept through five barangays there, affecting 1, 878 families.

Kabacan Mayor Herlo Guzman said emergency workers were dispatched to the flooded barangays --- Kayaga, Buluan, Simone, Magatos, and Nangaan --- to extend relief services to flood victims.