LEGAZPI CITY -- Learning from the many calamities that hit the Bicol peninsula for the past two years, disaster officials in the region will implement a program this year that will enable villages to come up with their own hazard maps.

        Office of Civil Defense regional director Bernardo Alejandro said that this year, the agency will focus on empowering villages for disaster preparedness. Aside from ensuring that every village has its own contingency plan, Alejandro said, they will also install new early warning devices in the most high-risk areas across the region.

        In 2007 alone, typhoons that hit Bicol left around P200-million worth of damage to agriculture and infrastructure based on OCD reports

        Alejandro said they have to conduct risk analysis anew since there had been topographical changes after the lahar, like river channels branching out or changing direction making old hazard maps obsolete.

        He said the OCD had requested an initial P200,000 for the project from the national government.

        Alejandro stressed the need for hazard maps even up to the village level.

        “Hazards differ from one village to another as the disaster management approach also varies per village too,” Alejandro said.

        He added village officials would be involved actively in disaster response, especially when a preemptive evacuation is necessary.

        The concept of preemptive evacuation was conceived late last year when President Macapagal-Arroyo ordered a mass evacuation of thousands of Albay villagers living in lahar and flood-prone areas days before typhoon Mina was expected to hit the province directly.

        Typhoon Mina threatened to hit Bicol and other Southern Luzon provinces directly but unexpectedly changed course and headed for Northern Luzon instead.

        Alejandro said, though preemptive evacuation is costly for the government, it will be a standard operating procedure this year whenever calamities pose threat to people’s lives.

Disaster training
        Village officials will also be trained on disaster management, especially the newly elected ones.

        Alejandro said villages in Camalig town in Albay had already underwent training last year and will serve as model villages.

        He said village officials had been trained to structure their own hazard maps and draft their own contingency plans.

Modern communicators
        In Albay province, the local government units (LGUs) will be asked to submit an inventory of their available resources that are necessary in times of disasters, like communications equipment and vehicles.

        Jukes Nuñez, operations officer of the Albay Provincial Disaster Coordinating Council (PDCC), said they have submitted to the United Nations a project proposal to upgrade the communication facilities of the LGUs.

        The P3-million proposal, which was submitted to the United Nations for funding, contains plans to provide priority municipalities with modern mobile communicators capable of transmitting fax and email.

        Nuñez said these modern devices are not dependent on communication lines that are usually toppled down during strong typhoons.

        From June last year, the PDCC had already installed 20 new units of the digitalized rain gage in flood-prone areas. They could serve as flood and landslide-warning devices.

        Amounting to not more than P10,000 each including the installation, the rain guages placed in an outpost near municipal halls are not only useful during calamities, but also helpful to the farmers in monitoring rain conditions.

        The Bicol Region, which faces the pacific ocean to the east, is part of the typhoon belt and the Pacific Ring of Fire with two active volcanoes erupting almost every decade.

        Both volcanoes--Mt. Mayon in Albay and Mt. Bulusan in Sorsogon--have showed signs of restiveness since 2006.

        Mt. Mayon’s last eruption was in 2006, when it ejected what volcanologists put to be the longest lava trail in 30 years.

        The estimated 80 million cubic meters of volcanic debris deposited in the slopes of the 2,462-meter Mt. Mayon during its past eruptions were flushed out by the record-high volume of rainfall brought by Supertyphoon Reming on Nov. 30, 2006.

        This caused one of the country’s deadliest tragedies of the century burying more than 1,000 people under lahar, many of which had never been recovered.

        Not wanting a reprise of the same tragedy, people in Albay now seriously heed disaster warnings, like during typhoon Mina when many fearful villagers fled their homes ahead of evacuation schedule.