Deadly Philippine Mudslide Was Bound to Happen — Official

MANILA, 19 February 2006 — The landslide on the central Philippine island of Leyte — which sits on a major geological fault and is in the path of most major typhoons — was a geographical accident waiting to happen, the Philippine Institute of Seismology and Volcanology (Phivolcs) said yesterday.

Since 1991 four deadly landslides or floods have struck the region and claimed thousands of lives.

In the latest disaster Friday, one side of Mount Can-abag crashed onto the southern village of Guinsaugon, a settlement of about 3,000 people. Just 57 survivors have so far been found.

The government’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau launched a geo-hazard mapping project on southern Leyte following a series of landslides in the adjacent tiny island of Panaon that claimed about 200 lives in December 2003.

Their location on the edge of the highly unstable undersea Philippine Trench means the bedrock of southern Leyte and the northeast coast of the major southern island of Mindanao are “badly broken or fragmented” and are “prone to weathering and erosion,” the study found.

When continuous rain falls, the water seeps into and saturates the rock fractures, creating a loose and unstable combination, experts say.

Leyte suffered its worst ever disaster in November 1991 when flash floods and landslides killed about 5,000 people in Ormoc, its second biggest city.

A landslide killed about 20 people earlier in the week in Sogod town, to the west of Guinsaugon.

A mild 2.6-magnitude earthquake that struck nine minutes before the Guinsaugon landslide may have helped trigger off the wall of mud that crashed down on the village, said Rene Solidum, head of Phivolcs, a government agency.

“The area could have really been ready for a landslide because of the amount of rainfall and if there was a minor earthquake, it might have hastened it,” Solidum said.

Leyte, which has a mountainous interior, and nearby Samar island are the gateways for the 19 typhoons and storms that on average batter the Southeast Asian archipelago every year. The typhoon season is still some months away but rain falls on Leyte all year round.

The government weather office, PAGASA, said 500 millimeters (20 inches) of rain had fallen on Leyte since Feb. 1, nearly five times the normal amount, due to the weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean known as La Niña.

Eleven villages have been evacuated in the island due to concerns of more landslides such as the one that inundated Ginsaugon.

Rosette Leria, governor of Southern Leyte province, said all of the communities have characteristics similar to those in Guinsaugon. She said residents were being relocated to seven evacuation centers.

“We asked them to leave yesterday,” Leria said. “I had some of the villages checked again today because some people didn’t want to leave their homes.”

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on Saturday warned that the Philippines could face more landslides amid forecasts of further heavy rain and promised to help threatened areas adopt safety precautions. The people must prepare for “the prospect of more landslides.”

She said the government is working to set up an early warning system.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources said the natural forest cover of Southern Leyte, which would have helped prevent erosion, has been replaced to a large extent by coconut plantations since the 1920s.

The encroachment of people in vulnerable upland areas has also been blamed for the frequent landslides in the Philippines.

A series of landslides on the mountainous east coast of the main island of Luzon in November 2004 claimed more than 1,000 lives. Out of the national population of 85 million, “around 24 million people are estimated to be living in the uplands and, as such, puts tremendous pressure in our forests,” environment assistant secretary Analiza Teh said late last year.

The upland population would double in 30 years at present trends, she added.

In Leyte and Samar, some 1.17 million people or nearly half the region’s total population of 3.7 million have encroached on 1.11 million hectares of upland areas, Teh said.