3 Boy Scouts die, 11 hurt in jamboree electrocution accident

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Three Boy Scouts died while 11 other scouts were hurt on Thursday morning, December 12, when the tent with metal materials that they were to transfer to a strategic spot in a camping site in Zamboanga City hit a dangling power transmission cable.

Officials of the Zamboanga City Police Office and Brig. Gen. Bowenn Joey Masauding, director of the Police Regional Office-9, separately told reporters before noontime Thursday that the electrocution incident in the highland Abong Abong area left three students, Kevin Iquid, Geoffrey Atillano and Alvin Gaspar, dead.

Sources from the Department of Education-9 and employees of the Zamboanga City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (CDRRMO) were quoted in radio reports as saying that three of the eleven other scouts transported by emergency responders to a hospital for treatment of injuries due to accidental electrocution are in critical condition.

Education officials overseeing the scouting jamboree, among them Butch Alejabo and the lawyer Jay-Ar Ortega, had told police investigators that the victims got electrocuted when a tent with metal framings they were carrying overhead, to be transferred from one spot to another in the Abong Abong camping site, hit a dangling power line of the Zamboanga City Electric Cooperative.

Masauding said their investigators, officials of the Bureau of Fire Protection and personnel of the Zamboanga CDRRMO, under Mayor John Dalipe, will soon release a common report on the incident.