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First Posted on Inside Mindanao (www.insidemindanao.com) on September 30, 2008
Revisiting the Masara landslides: Lessons to be learned
By Antonio M. Manaytay
MACO, COMPOSTELA VALLEY—Ten–year–old Joseph Carreon was silently leafing through the pages of a Bible story book while sitting on a desk inside a cramped classroom of Elizalde Elementary School his family shared with other ten families. The school was the temporary shelter of more than 100 families affected by the twin landslides in Masara village of this town, some 3 kilometers away from here.
He appeared engrossed with the book as his eyes were fixed on the illustrations of the book that nestled on his lap. But a closer look would reveal that he is not only engrossed on what he saw on the pages of the book he was reading. His eyes were near empty and lacked the glow of a ten–year–old whose primary concern must have been to go to school and play.
The ten–year–old lost his father to the landslides that hit the village last September 7. His father, Esmeraldo Carreon was one of the 26 declared casualties of the landslides including the two persons declared missing. The body was retrieved three days after the incident.
"Wala na siya (He's gone)," Joseph told this writer as he wryly smiled. No, it was not a smile. It could have been a cry of anguish of a son who lost a father in a tragedy that hit the mining village.
'Ten feet from hell'
Survivors of the twin landslides talked of hearing "a thunderous sound as they felt the ground shook underneath their houses" in the early dawn of September 7.
Catherine Redillas, a 30–year–old mother of two, said she felt as if it were the "end of the world".
"We were awakened with the sound of crumbling earth as shouts for help and anguish," she calmly recounted as if reliving the images of the tragedy in her mind. The house next to her, she discovered later, was completely buried by mud.
Her house, she said in dialect, was only "ten feet away from hell".
"We immediately gathered our children from their sleep and ran away from the raging mud," she recounted.
As they ran away, she heard voices of women and children crying for help and disappeared under the onslaught of mud and rocks.
The previous day, September 6 at around 3 p.m., the first landslide occurred in the village as the portion of a mountain overlooking the mining community of Masara caved in.
According to Army Major Rolando Rodil, who heads the rescue operations, eight persons were declared dead and several houses were crushed by big boulders and buried in the mud in that first landslide.
Residents were advised to evacuate to safer grounds for fear that another landslides will occur.
Those near the site where the first landslide happened were evacuated to Masara Elementary School, which is slightly elevated and situated some 100 meters away. But some residents returned to their home in the evening.
"Most of the residents returned to their homes despite warning of possible landslides," the Army officer said.
The residents were sleeping when the second landslides occurred past 3 a.m.
"It was too late for most of the people to escape the raging mud coming from the top of the mountain," he said. The mudslide originating from some 150 meters upslope at a gully from the foothill crossed the river and buried the houses that stood directly in the line of slide.
'More than 26 dead'
The Municipal Disaster Coordinating Council (MDCC) report pegged the number of casualties at 26, including the two persons declared missing; 32 injured; and 81 houses, two company bunkhouses, and the barangay hall and health center were buried and damaged.
Maco mayor Arthur Voltaire Rimando pledged to continue the search and retrieval operations in order "to find the remaining two missing persons so that their family can give them proper burial." As of this posting, the missing persons were not yet found.
But some people alleged that the total number of casualties is more than 26.
Watchman Alejandro Baylon said the "number of people that are yet to be retrieved is even higher than what is officially on record."
"The truth is that the actual number of persons killed in the landslides is more or less 100," he alleged, citing that there are people living in the area who were not documented.
A member of the search and retrieval operations, who asked not to be named, shared to this writer that there was an instance where "a teenage girl asked the rescuers to dig a particular site because her parents was buried in there". But the request was not granted due to lack of necessary equipment to properly dig the area.
"We know that there are still a lot of persons buried but we are helpless because we don’t have the necessary equipment to do it," he confided.
Past forward
The September 7 tragedy was not the first to happen in the village. A landslide killed 10 people and destroyed seven houses near the banks of Masara river in the same area last year.
As a result, the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) had already recommended relocation of residents and the landslide–prone place be abandoned after conducting an investigation.
Although the experience left the people in the area fearful of another landslide to happen but they stayed on. Most, if not all, of the residents depend on the local gold mining industry for their livelihood. The area is about three kilometers away from the active mine site of Apex Crew Gold Mining Corporation.
After the September 7 landslides, however, almost all residents were evacuated and resettled at a temporary site provided by the Diocese of Tagum located in Barangay Elizalde.
Antonio Cloma, operations officer of the Office of Civil Defense (OCD) of Region 11, said the site of the Masara landslides "remains to be high risk and [there is a] high possibility of more landslides."
Gold rush
Masara village is one the three gold rush villages of Maco town. The town, approximately 70 kilometers northwest from Davao City which is 962 southeast of Manila, has a long history of gold mining dating back even before World War II. It lies at the extreme end of the eastern gold belt of the country and considered as one of the country’s important gold mining districts "situated along this great sinistral strike-slip fault structure that includes Compostela–Monkayo, Surigao–Agusan, Masbate, Paracale–J. Panganiban, and Baguio districts".
According to its website, Apex Mining Company acquired its main project in the country, the Maco Mine, in 1973, following several other operators before it, and began mining and milling activities in the early l980s. Maco Mine was formerly known as "Masara" but the name was changed "in recognition of the entire municipality where mining occurs rather than one particular village near the mine."
It stopped its operations in 1991 because of a labor dispute and prolonged weakness in the gold price. In the late 1990s, the company conducted limited operations and in 2000 "it fully suspended mining and leased out the various parts of its property to sub–contractors in exchange for royalty and rental payments."
The management of company was taken over in a partnership of Crew Gold Corporation and Mapula Creek Gold Corporation.
An extensive drilling program conducted by the company last year (the same year the first landslide occurred in Masara village) indicated that Maco sits on a mountain of high–grade gold estimated at 1,462,000 tons.
As reported to the MGB of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) of Region 11, the gold recovered from the area in 2007 was just over 7,000 ounces and it targeted an over of 16,000 for 2008. It is estimated that the area has the capacity to produce 50,000 ounces (320,000 tons) of gold annually.
Small scale mining
Aside from the multi–national corporations, several small–scale miners operate in the area especially along the stretch of Masara river.
According to the records available at the Provincial Mining Regulatory Board (PMRB), there are at least three small–scale mining that operates in Maco town, namely: Panoraon Small–scale Mining Area, Lumangang Small–scale Mining Area, Tandik Small–scale Mining Area. This list, however, does not include a number of small–scale operators who do not coordinate with the PMRB.
These areas are about to be declared as Minahan ng Bayan (People's Mining Area) in accordance with Republic Act 7942, also known as the Philippine Mining Act of 1995.
All throughout the province of Compostela Valley, the PMRB recorded at least 13 small–scale mining operators.
A staff in the PMRB, who asked not to be identified because he is not in the position to speak, said "it is difficult to keep track all the mining activities in the province due to some limitations within the government bureaucracy." He did not elaborate what these limitations are.
"If it is difficult for us to track the activities of the small–scale miners, how much more the big mining companies whose approval are done at the national level," he said.
Prevention is better than cure
Salem Demuna, head of a non–government organization accredited with the provincial government, asked the members of the Provincial Disaster Coordinating Council (PDCC) to probe "if there is a connection between the landslides that happened in Masara to the mining operations."
A representative from Apex Crew Mining Company told the provincial disaster body in the same meeting that Masara is not within the mining operations of their company.
But the Learned Kagan Muslim Foundation, an NGO headed by Demuna, is suspicious that there is a "direct link between these natural disasters with the long years of mining operations."
"If nature exacts revenge from being logged and denuded, there is also a big possibility that the mining activities in the area contribute to these disasters that affect thousands of lives," he reasoned out.
These observations are not without basis.
The MGB in a report after the landslide last year said the area was at risk due to poor ground conditions, as well as "unsystematic human intervention, mainly [extensive] logging and mining".
Its recommendation to evacuate the villagers to safer ground and a ban on any future resettlement falls short of "comprehensively addressing the problem", Demuna said.
"It is time for us to demand for more serious actions to prevent the occurrence of similar disaster in the future," he ended.
END