Church Slams Camarines Norte's Ondoy Damage Report

NAGA CITY-The Social Action Center of the Diocese of Daet has condemned the reported P73 million damage of tropical depression "Ondoy" in Camarines Norte, saying that it was malicious and fabricated.

Fr. Norberto A. Eyule, executive director of the center, has asked Defense Secretary and National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) Chair Gilberto Teodoro to implement corrective measures if there are "lapses" in the allegedly bloated report.

Eyule said Ondoy did little damage to agriculture and nothing to infrastructure in the province that the Php. 73 Million worth of reported damages had no concrete bases. "Camarines Norte was spared from the onslaught of [tropical depression] Ondoy."

He said the provincial engineer of Camarines Norte, in a disaster coordinating council meeting last October 4, admitted that the reported damages in infrastructure included those that were not due to Ondoy.

"It is not proper for the elected leaders to manufacture false information in order to get public funds. These are the bottom line of our standpoint on this issue."

He said calamity funds, instead, should go to other storm-hit provinces and communities that needed resources to recover.

"We are concerned with the implication of the manufactured documents. They willfully cheated the information. It is even worse if they can justify this to the Commission on Audit."

Camarines Norte was placed under state of calamity by a proclamation of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo due to supposed disastrous effects of Ondoy.

But Vice Governor Roy Padilla last October 2 requested the President to remove the province from the list of provinces under state of calamity.

Padilla said the province must be exempted from being declared as calamity area because it did not have "calamitous experience" from Ondoy, as shown by a certification from the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Seevices Administration (Pagasa).

The Daet Weather Station of Pagasa certified that the province experienced only 204 millimeter amount of rainfall and 32 kilometers per hour sustained winds when the tropical depression passed 95 kilometers north of the capital town of Daet.

Padilla said the quantity of rainfall was "almost normal" to the province every rainy season. He said flooding was observed in low-lying villages but [the flooding] had subsided immediately.

"By Saturday (September 26), there was scattered rain and by Sunday, the sun had appeared and there was no more rain. The wind was not palpable and was not enough to create a deluge" Padilla said.

He said the damages reflected in the report were mostly to roads that had been in "perennial" state of disrepair even before Ondoy.

One of the roads that the provincial government reported damaged was the Sta. Elena-Baslad Road. According to the report, the road underwent "washed-out wearing due to continuous rains and flood" and needs immediate restoration work at a cost of P3 million.

Another "damaged" road was the Labo-Fundado-Bakal Road, which "became unstable at some asphalt section due to continuous heavy rains and flood." The road needs P5 million for it to be restored, said the report.

But Camarines Norte Governor Jesus O. Typoco Jr, in a phone interview on Tuesday, denied the allegations of Eyule and Padilla.

"It is a standard operating procedure for the regional disaster coordinating council (RDCC) to ask for damage report whenever a province is placed under state of calamity. So when the RDCC asked us to submit a report we just complied," said Typoco.

"I immediately advised the provincial engineer and the provincial agriculturist to assess the damage upon instruction of the RDCC."

He said Vice Governor Roy Padilla was just grandstanding and playing politics and that Eyule was a critic of his administration.

He admitted that some of the roads mentioned in the report were already damaged even before Ondoy, but said that the situations of the roads were worsened by the heavy rains brought by the weather disturbance.

"Most of roads are only asphalted and easily wear out during heavy rains, such as what happened a week before and the day Ondoy affected our province."

He said if the provincial government intended to get something out of government funds, then they could have done it by releasing calamity fund.

"But we did not release calamity fund, "kahit singko (even five cents), because we know that Ondoy did not put the province in calamitous situation."

He said the province was not visited by typhoons and other natural or man-made disasters since the start of his term in 2001 that its calamity fund has remained intact.

"Padilla is thinking that the provincial government already had received the P73 million as reflected in the damage report. But we did not. In fact, we are not expecting it because we know that NDCC and the government cannot provide that amount due to fund shortage. But if ever the government would disburse funds based on the damage report, the provincial government would accept it, so the roads would be repaired."