400 FAMILIES DISPLACED

This aerial photo is taken of the densely populated Barangay Pasil, Cebu City as the fire rages and later razed to the ground around 300 houses in three sitios (sub-villages) on Sunday, Jan. 14, 2018.
(CDN PHOTO/CHRISTIAN MANINGO)

PASIL FIRE

Ingracia Gabison, 70, was on the rooftop of her employer’s three-storey apartment when she saw a massive fire eating away the neighbors’ homes.

Gabison, the househelper of Ingrid Maranga, did not want to leave believing that the firefighters will be able to put out the fire before it could reach their house.

“Di man gyud ta ko monaog. Sige ko ug ampo nga dili maapil kasunog ang balay sa akong amo. Kwarenta nako ka tuig nila,” she told Cebu Daily News.

(I did not want to leave the house. I prayed hard that the house of my employer will not be burned. I have been serving them for 40 years.)

Other residents urged her to leave the house or else she would die.

On her way out of the house, Gabison brought along a Bible and a notebook, which contained the list of her employer’s debtors.

“I cannot let this notebook be burned and reduced to ashes. My employer entrusted this notebook to me,” she said.

Gabison said her employer owned an apartment, sold liquified petroleum gas (LPG) tanks and operated a junk shop, all which have been burned down.

That notebook and the Bible were all that Gabison were able to bring with her as she joined the several hundred persons from nearly 400 households who were rendered homeless yesterday when a fire swept through three sitios in the densely populated socialized housing community in Barangay Pasil in Cebu City.

The fire, which was first reported at 12:26 p.m., swiftly spread through the houses, mostly made of light materials and separated only by narrow alleys, razing to the ground about 300 houses before it was placed under control at 2:54 p.m. according to fire authorities.

Fire Supt.Ronaldo Orbeta, assistant regional director of the Bureau of Fire Protection in Central Visayas (BFP-7), said the fire left no house unscathed in Sitios Sun-ok, Lawis Riverside and Lawis Puthawan.

The fire, of still undetermined origin, occurred just as public attention was focused on the Sinulog sa Barangay, a dance parade contest among the different barangays in Cebu City that formed part of the Sinulog Festival, which kicked off on Friday, January 12, and will culminate on January 21.

The participants from Barangay Pasil momentarily abandoned their position in the dance parade and rushed home to help their families save their belongings but later came back to do their final dance at the Cebu City Sports Complex. The group went on to win third place in the street dancing category (see separate story)

The Pasil fire is also the second big fire to hit Cebu City just within the first half of January, coming in the heels of the blaze that razed the six-storey Metro Ayala department store at the Ayala Center Cebu mall complex on Jan. 5.

Narrow alleys

Orbeta, who was the ground commander for the firefighters combating the Pasil fire, said they had to raise a general alarm at 2:22 p.m., which required all available firefighting units to come to their aid, because of their difficulty in controlling the blaze, as firetrucks could not get through the narrow roads that snaked through the affected area.

Orbeta said the fire, which was finally placed under control at 2:54 p.m., was reported to have started in the second floor of the house owned by an Ely Petalcoren, which at that time, were occupied by his children Joshua and Alicia.

He said they were still investigating how the fire started, including reports that children playing with matches allegedly caused the fire, as well as claims by some residents that a group of persons were having a drug session inside the house when the fire broke out.

According to Orbeta, the initial damage to the residences was placed at P3 million but was projected to rise as the investigation continues.

Shelter for the fire victims

The number of displaced residents was also placed at around 400 families, said Nagiel Bañacia, the chief of the Cebu City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office (CDRRMO).

As of 6 p.m. Sunday, 180 families or 951 individuals were so far listed as fire victims by the Cebu City Department of Social Welfare and Services (DSWS), he added.

Bañacia said the victims were given temporary shelter at the Pasil Elementary School.

“There are 12 classrooms in the school that are due for demolition because a high-rise classroom building will be built there. But it can still be used. So they are staying there,” he said.

If the area is not enough to accommodate the fire victims, they will also be using the barangay’s sports complex as well as the Don Bosco School in Barangay Pasil as evacuation centers.

Personnel from the DSWS have also arrived in the area to conduct a profiling of the victims.

As a standard, DSWS will be providing packed meals for all the fire victims for three days.

DSWS gives a financial assistance of as much as P20,000 to qualified beneficiaries who were affected by fires in the city.

Meanwhile, residents of the fire -hit sitios were assured that they could still go back to the areas where their homes used to stand.

Genevieve Alcoseba, operations chief of the city government’s Division for the Welfare of the Urban Poor (DWUP), said that the land hit by the fire used to be owned by the city government but had been awarded to its occupants under the city’s Slum Improvement and Resettlement (SIR) program.

“We are yet to visit the area by tomorrow (today) morning to check. But as far as I know, that area is city-owned, that is part of the SIR program of DWUP. Some of them already own the lots, others are still paying. But for sure, they can go back,” she told Cebu Daily News in a phone interview. /With a report from reporter Jose Santino S. Bunachita