From over 40 casualties, the death toll has risen to nearly 100 in the Carmen, Bohol Province-Cebu City earthquake. At that figure, the Carmen-Cebu tremor can qualify as a Killer Quake. Cebu and nearby areas has to be declared to be in a state of calamity. There are limited manuevers that aircraft can make at the Cebu airport due to the cracking and opening up of the airport's runways.
The six million dollar question is: how many more incidents like those in Carmen, Bohol and Cebu City and the other ones in Leyte, Samar will we be expecting?
Were the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Philvolcs) prepared adequately enough with equipment to monitor ground movement, tectonic plate disturbance, the nearly 100 deaths could have been avoided. 27 Billion Philippine Pesos is earmarked for pork barrel in the 2014 General Appropriations Act out of a total expenditure program of 2.26 Trillion Philippine Pesos. Would it be difficult to allocate even half of that pork barrel budget for emergency preparedness, disaster risk reduction, equipment upgrade?
Past Warnings of Big Disaster
This site has been warning the public for more than four years since the time of the former President, Mrs. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. Due to the total torpedoing of the private sector (Corinthian Gardens, Forbes Park, Dasmarinas Village, the owners of high rise condominiums at the left side of EDSA southbound, among others), of the program for predicting highly lethal effects of a major tremor in Metro Manila and the replication of this effort in many urban areas in the country by the same sector in collusion with some corrupt officials in the government, a large disaster and environmental hazards summit was proposed to be supported by the Philippine Government and the United Nations, among other institutions from many other sectors - including the non-profit (minus the Napoles et al NGOs).
Wanting responses
It is reiterated that in the time of Mrs. Arroyo, only the then Administrator of the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA), Ms. Elaine Bautista, now Mrs. Horn, had the small effort to make an email message to the proponents of the 2010 Disaster and Environmental Hazards Mapping Summit. And that was only because the United Nations Environment Programm (UNEP) told the former Ms. Bautista to get in touch with HMES 2010 organizing group. At the time, concurrent to her post in MARINA, Ms. Bautista was considered a friend of UNEP and a significant point person for the Philippine Government in relation to selected UNEP concerns - particularly about emergency and assistance.
When Mr. Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino 3rd became President, the organizing group wrote to Ms. Corazon Juliano Soliman of the Department of Social Welfare and Development and Gen. Voltaire Tuvera Gazmin. Ms. Soliman did not respond. It was noticed however that several days later, Gen. Gazmin, the Secretary of the Department of National Defense gave an interview to national media.
In that interview, when Gazmin was asked about what the people should do when a disaster strikes, he replied: "Run for your lives."
Carrying the barest minimum luggage in their bodies, the poor, helpless people in above photos must have taken advice similar to that of Gen. Voltaire Gazmin's to leave and forget belongings elsewhere and to "run for your lives."
It will appear that the kind of response the government has given is exceedingly wanting in substance. It is hoped however that as a grandfather and parent, Gazmin to no fault of his own was merely showing his personal concern for the safety of the life of the average citizen. He was probably very well-meaning and was admonishing the people not to bring their television sets, beds, furniture, cash safety vaults, washing machines, cabinets, sofa, stoves with their fuel gas tanks, desk-stand-ceiling fans, air conditioners, desktop computers and refrigerators outside of their homes and instead to proceed to a more safe location and be saved in time of major catastrophe.
The head of the Philvolcs, Dr. Renato Solidum absolutely cannot be faulted and is blameless. For decades, PHIVOLCS had been ready to accept the support for equipment upgrade and modernization. Despite the billions of funds allocated to the departments of the government, the great oversight of perpetually forgetting to take care of the Philvolcs modernization programme has consistently been committed by this government.
Despite the billions lost for the personal enrichment of selected persons in our public sector and their intimate partners in very enterprising undertakings in the private sector, no one has shown keen interest in allowing the Philvolcs to finally get hold of the adequate funding for acquisition of hardware and software that will highly increase its forecasting accuracy and its earthquake trending studies and research on the major faults all over the country.
Delayed Faults Discoveries
When the huge Negros earthquake hit, similar sights such as those above where streets crack and open up like putok monay, or baked whole potatoes in Cebu City were noted. Anyone can find the evidence over the open sources like the internet.
The more unfortunate incident that occurred after the earthquake was that the Phivolcs had to make the statement that "what caused the severe cracks on the ground is that probably there is a fault line in Negros." Philvolcs immediately follows that statement up with, "we are going to study further."
Need for Network of Sensing Stations
The Departments of Science and Technology and Environment and Natural Resources (DOST, DENR) are both involved in mapping potential disaster and environmental hazards.
The TESDA has a more or less 10-Million Philippine Peso fund for coordinating foreign-based Filipino scientists' visits to the Philippines to contribute to the increasing of our scientific benchmarking efforts. The Phivolcs should be engaged in a similar project or one that is jointly administered with TESDA.
Phivolcs may receive several millions of Pesos to purchase minor equipment, but to install a national sensor network linked to IP-capacity ready cameras programmable for specific monitoring purposes, the government has to spend no less than a few billions of Pesos.
It is not demanded that Mr. Aquino suffers remorse from doling out billions as incentives to the rubber stamp Congress - both upper and lower house - at least for the sake of the integrity of the agency and the welfare of this nation's helpless people in the face of disasters like the one that severely hit Sendai and Fukushima in Japan, he should already authorize the expenditure for Philvolcs.
Mapping Requirement
However, central to laying in place a sensor - photo/video capture network all over the country, is a wholly dependable and fully functional Geographic Information System based mapping capability that must have all the requisite map factors. Complete and no less. It cannot be a map that is exactly similar to the National Mapping Resource Information Authority (NAMRIA) or the Land Registration Authority (LRA). Neither can it be the full replica of the map the government uniformed services are using.
All these maps are useless. NAMRIA for instance calls up small business entities like the EZ Maps and asks for map factors from that small company whose resources cannot even compare to the total janitorial budget of the agency to clean the NAMRIA bathrooms and comfort rooms. How can a nationwide agency like NAMRIA become parasites of small, struggling businesses like EZ Maps whose total office space is not even 2,000 square meters with a measly manpower complement while NAMRIA has a whole building, a staff meant for a large national agency and a national annual budget? It has exotic named departments like Photogrammetry and personnel that can travel the entire length of the country to source map factors. That is a very puzzling situation.
Instead of putting load upon the shoulders of small businesses, NAMRIA is supposed to be the respository of mapping information as the title of the agency implies and should be the one helping these entrepreneurs sell the country to patron tourists-travellers abroad.
High Level Capacity Development Requirement
To enable the above envisioned system to be commissioned successfully, Mr. Aquino should authorize spending for the highest level training and capability build up for Phivolcs, other DOST, DENR attached agencies like NAMRIA that are needed to make the system completely running without glitch.
Other Necessities
Any other necessities like power requirements, backbone installations and cable requisitions, can be tackled by comprehensive needs analyses and budget planning that will be designed to surface everything that the system will require to be able to smoothly operate and provide sustained serviceability for at least five years with intervening minor upgrades in between.
To make the task easier, it need not be overemphasized that Dr. Solidum and Philvolcs must employ open architecture in all of their hardware installation needs. The software should also be basic and open as its hardware component must be.
No comments:
Post a Comment