Source: The Daily Tribune
The visit to Tacloban by President Aquino is now proven to be a publicity stunt.
A power generator and a water bladder were placed in the area where the presidential visit was scheduled, but these were immediately taken out again after Aquino left the area, a typhoon victim who witnessed this said, as quoted in a report from the Christian Science Monitor (CSM).
In an interview with the typhoon victim who lost his home, A Mr. Ginas was quoted in the CSM report as pointing to the bunkhouses and saying that “This is more like a warehouse than a home,” he said, pointing to the water dripping from the roof and staining the plywood floor. “I can’t move my family in here until they have fixed the leak.”
Ginas, a mechanic, is at the center of a controversy over “bunkhouses,” barracks-like structures designed to provide temporary housing for 25,000 of the worst hit victims of November’s destructive storm. International aid agencies working with the United Nations say the bunkhouses do not meet minimum standards to ensure “a certain degree of privacy, security and dignity.”
The typhoon displaced over 4.1 million people. Most are now patching up or rebuilding their houses, or living in evacuation centers, tent cities, or with relatives. The government built the bunkhouses as interim accommodation for families whose former homes were close to the sea, where they are no longer allowed to live because of the risk of storm surges.
Bowing to international pressure, the authorities have agreed to double the size of the rooms that families are assigned in future bunkhouses, from 90 square feet to 180 square feet. Hastily built by government contractors, they offer few comforts to typhoon victims who have been told they may be living there for as long as two years, until permanent housing is ready for them.
At a site just south of Tacloban City, 17 bunkhouses skirt an expanse of waterlogged wasteland. About 50 families have already moved in to two of them. Each family lives in a single small plywood box-like room, 8 feet by 12 feet. They have no electricity, nor any source of drinking water, though the walkways outside their doors are flooded ankle deep with rainwater.
Residents complain that they have received no food aid since they began arriving a week ago. There are only eight toilets for 250 people, and the cooking area – a waist high shelf of packed earth – is so cramped that some women have built makeshift fireplaces on the ground outside their front doors.
The buildings are brightly painted, but they have been built too close together, increasing the risk of fire in dry weather, international aid workers say. Made of plywood, their corrugated iron roofs lack any insulation to protect the residents from the heat.
Nor have the Philippines authorities used accepted practice for choosing who will be moved into the bunkhouses. Residents say they won a lottery, with no consideration given to how needy or vulnerable they were.
Ginas says he will be glad to move in once his leak is fixed because since the typhoon he has been living with his wife and two children in a relative’s shack near the shore, and “the sea is roaring again” as a storm brews.
But he is angry that the authorities, who put in a power generator and a water bladder when President Aquino visited the site then, took them away again as soon as the President had left.
But he is angry that the authorities, who put in a power generator and a water bladder when President Aquino visited the site then, took them away again as soon as the President had left.
The bunkhouses have sparked a political storm in the Philippines, amid opposition claims that local politicians in the worst-hit coastal areas colluded with private contractors to overcharge the government for the buildings. The head of the police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, Benjamin Magalong, said last week the allegations “have basis” and would be investigated.
Reynaldo Abregana, meanwhile, is philosophical. A carpenter, he moved into a bunkhouse room here last week with his wife and two small children. He finds the space cramped, but says, “it is better than a tarpaulin, which is all the shelter I have had for the last few weeks. Anyway, we don’t have any choice.”
Meanwhile in another part of the Philippines, in Mindanao, that had floods and landslides, the deal toll from have risen.
Twenty-two people have been killed and nearly 200,000 others evacuated as floods and landslides hit a southern Philippine region still recovering from a deadly 2012 typhoon, the government said Tuesday.
Torrential rain struck the eastern section of Mindanao island at the weekend, unleashing a fresh round of misery for survivors of Typhoon Bopha, civil defense officials said.
“Major rivers overflowed, causing people to drown in areas still recovering from Typhoon Pablo,” local civil defense operations officer Franz Irag told AFP, using the local designation for Typhoon Bopha, which struck the region in December 2012.
“Many of the victims had not managed to rebuild and were staying in temporary shelters when they were hit by fresh flooding,” Irag said.
Weekend floods and landslides killed eight people in Davao Oriental province and five in Compostela Valley, Irag said.
Additionally, six were buried in a landslide on the small southern island of Dinagat while three other people drowned in nearby areas, John Lenwayan, a civil defense official for the region, told Agence France Presse by telephone.
The bad weather also forced more than 194,000 people to flee their homes, Irag and Lenwayan said.
The two officials said the rains started abating on Monday and some of those who took refuge in government-run shelters were returning to their homes.
The Mindanao floods occurred amid an international rehabilitation effort for areas destroyed by Super Typhoon Haiyan in November last year.
Haiyan left at least 7,986 people dead or missing across the central Philippines, according to a running government tally. Bodies are still being recovered from under the rubble.
An average of 20 typhoons and storms kill hundreds of people across the Philippines every year, but the last three years have been exceptional in the ferocity of some of these disasters.
Bopha, which struck the region in December 2012, left 1,900 people dead or missing on Mindanao by government count.
Tropical Storm Washi also unleashed floods that killed 1,080 people in December 2011. Christian Science Monitor, AFP and Mario J. Mallari
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