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| RELIEF COORDINATION. President Aquino (right clockwise) on Sunday meets with Interior Secretary Mar Roxas (second right) and Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez (in bright orange shirt) and other local officials to discuss alternative measures to hasten relief operations in and rehabilitation of Tacloban and other areas of Leyte devastated by Supertyphoon “Yolanda.” PHOTO BY GIL NARTEA/MALACACANG PHOTO BUREAU |
TACLOBAN CITY—President Aquino, Interior
Secretary Mar Roxas and Mayor Alfred Romualdez met here on Sunday night
behind closed doors, quietly sealing a partnership between Task Force
Yolanda and the leadership of the local government that could bolster
relief efforts for typhoon survivors.
The President sought the meeting with the
mayor on Day 9 of the aftermath of Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” ostensibly
playing referee between Romualdez and Roxas, who had not been on
speaking terms because of disagreements over relief efforts and the
interior department’s initiative to take over the devastated city.
Aquino and Romualdez met briefly, with Roxas hardly saying anything.
“We can now coordinate the efforts for
relief… and address the issues confronting us,” Romualdez told reporters
later. A Romualdez relative said Roxas “did not say much” during what
the mayor described as a “brief” meeting.
Asked by the Inquirer if all’s well that
ends well, Romualdez said: “We have no problem. But you have to look at
it this way—that everything changes every day, so there is nothing
permanent in a situation like this.”
He cited the peace and order problem at the
outset, when lawless elements had threatened to harass residents, which
he said was solved in 48 hours by the Philippine National Police.
Asked about his thoughts on the President
personally seeking him out as well as the apparent “disconnect” between
him and Roxas, the mayor said:
“In a crisis like this, the best way you can solve this is you have to be on the ground from the beginning.”
Romualdez recalled that a day after Yolanda
struck, he was already mobilizing what little resources were left to
the city government to rescue survivors and immediately clear the main
roads of debris, including the hundreds of corpses.
“It’s hard because I drove the vehicles,
heavy equipment. I went to barangays (villages) to know the problems
because you don’t have enough resources, so you have to maximize them.
That’s the best way to do it so that you get the job done,” he said.
Asked about the “disconnect” between Roxas’ camp and the mayor’s office, he said:
“There’s no problem with coordination
between local and national [units]… The local government, we’re using
all the resources we can [mobilize], and the national [agencies] also
that are here on the ground are also maximizing here the resources they
have. If they don’t have resources, we can’t blame them also. Then the
national government in Manila should give them more resources.”
“At the beginning, we were retrieving bodies with two trucks. What can we do with two trucks?” he asked.
He said relief distribution and retrieving bodies were the priorities now. “That continues,” he said.
Asked about relief efforts, he said: “The
problem is not the quantity—it’s the distribution. That is the problem
not only in Tacloban but in other areas.”
Local politics
Except in hushed voices, nobody here would
want to be quoted on record to explain what caused the apparent rift
between Romualdez and Roxas in the immediate aftermath of Yolanda.
Romualdez won a third term opposite Liberal Party candidate Bem Noel, the former An-Waray representative, in the May 2012 polls.
Roxas is the president on-leave of the
ruling party but the President and even his sister Kris had campaigned
for Noel, a friend of the President.
But observers claim the President
personally reaching out to Romualdez shows that Aquino has realized the
humanitarian catastrophe engulfing Tacloban and the rest of Eastern
Visayas should be spared from politics.
In a separate interview, Leyte Rep. Martin
Romualdez said there had been a “disconnect” between City Hall and the
Department of the Interior and Local Government.
However, Mayor Romualdez was banking on the
President’s public pronouncement that the local government unit should
spearhead relief and recovery efforts in times of calamities, with the
national government only augmenting local resources.
“But he (Roxas) asked the mayor to relinquish power and authority,” recalled the congressman.
“Mayor, face it, the City Hall is basically
inutile now,” said Representative Romualdez, recalling what Roxas had
supposedly told the mayor right after Yolanda struck.
“So the mayor answered that well, [I can do
my job] if you give me replenishment of police personnel who, as you
know, have been decimated because either “they’re casualties themselves
or have been killed, if not, close members of the families have probably
died.” Per one account, only 30 police officers turned up on Nov. 9.
Troops requested
The mayor suggested that the Department of
National Defense provide Tacloban with a military force “to secure the
perimeter because we’ve heard of unverified reports that some lawless
elements have been trying to take advantage of the [aid] caravan as far
as Samar, and there were rumors of some NPA (New People’s Army) members
coming down,” the lawmaker said.
Inmates, facing death, also escaped from the city jail.
Himself a victim—he and his family barely
escaped the storm surge that flooded his seaside residence—he “operated
the backhoe himself, digging the mass graves and cleaning the roads,”
said the congressman. “The operator was either dead or missing.”
Representative Romualdez denied that local
officials in Tacloban were unprepared for Yolanda. “The destruction was
so vast that we… everybody was overwhelmed. The national [government]
can always rely on the assets of local governments when they arrive in
the locality. But as you see, the destruction was so vast that all the
personnel were affected, the offices were affected,” he said.
Nobody could have prepared enough for such a superstorm, much less immediately cope with it in the aftermath, he said.
“The resources like vehicles, which are so
few, at least at the outset for ready deployment, were taken over by the
national government. Everyone needs a service vehicle,” he said.
Private donors
The brother of Representative Romualdez,
businessman Philip Romualdez, rallied the private sector as early as
last week to immediately come to the aide of his fellow Leyteños,
personally asking several mining companies to send relief supplies, food
packs, medical teams, tarpaulins and a water filtration system to the
survivors.
The Oxford-educated Philip is the president of the Chamber of Mines of the Philippines and CEO of Benguet Corp.
In response to the request, Marcventures
Mining and Development Corp. sent a “mercy ship” containing tons of
relief supplies, personnel and rescue equipment to Tolosa, Tanauan,
Palo, San Miguel and Santa Fe towns, and Tacloban City; Benguet Corp.
sent a medical group to Tanauan and Tolosa, as well as a crisis
management team and two helicopters; Nickel Asia provided two barges of
relief goods that went to Guiuan, Samar province; Atlas Mining provided
ships to ferry goods from Cebu province to Tacloban; and Philex Mining
provided rescue teams.
Many companies, such as Indophil, also provided cash donations.
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