The waiting continues for the Naga City government and the landslide-affected 7,467 individuals or 1,895 families, who have been cooped up in 11 evacuation centers in the city for more than a month.
This developed after Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu announced a tentative schedule to start the final geotagging of the delineated critical zone on Wednesday, which was supposed to be completed on Thursday, but did not happen.
Over three weeks ago, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau delineated over 170-hectares around and within the critical zone of the landslide area that hit Barangay Tina-an, Naga City.
The DENR is supposed to tag unsafe structures within the delineated critical zone, so the LGU could identify which families could return to their homes.
But as of 4:30 p.m. yesterday (Thursday), there still was no clearance released by both the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and the Naga City government.
Junjie Cruz, Naga city councilor and vice chairman of the City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, said in a phone interview on Thursday that they had no choice but to wait for the report of the DENR despite their limited resources.
“We hope that this process can be hastened. We hope that this can be completed so that the residents can be sent home or relocated. There is no place like home,” said Cruz in Cebuano.
He also said that the local government was making do with their limited resources, providing for the evacuees, especially since there were fewer donations for the evacuees.
He also said that there were also fewer volunteers at the evacuation centers and that the bulk of volunteers now were made up of the 357 evacuees registered under the emergency employment program of the labor department in Central Visayas.
He said this was mainly because most of the volunteers had to attend classes on weekdays.
As of yesterday, the city has received over P14,214,819.20 in cash aid, which will be used as financial assistance for the affected families.
The Apo Land and Quarry Corp. is also shouldering food expenses for the 11 evacuation centers.