Help continues to pour in for Naga; responders leave
The Cebu City Government came to the aid of the City of Naga Government two weeks after the city experienced a landslide that wiped out a community in Sitio Sindulan, Barangay Tina-an.
A group of Korean nationals already living in Cebu also donated over a million pesos worth of goods and cash to Naga to help with its relief and recovery efforts now that the local government unit is terminating the search and rescue operations and moving on to post-disaster response such as clearing the landslide-affected areas of Sitio Sindulan and Tagaytay.
Forty-five highly trained rescuers from the special rescue units of the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) in Regions 6 and 10 officially ended their search and rescue mission in Naga yesterday after two weeks.
BFP 7 Director Samuel Tadeo said the fire officers were among the augmentation force from regions they requested to help in the search and rescue.
Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office Chief Baltazar Tribunalo told SunStar Cebu that the Incident Command Group, which he and Naga Mayor Kristine Vanessa Chiong head, is slowly helping the families of landslide victims, especially those who remain miss- ing, in processing their grief.
Tribunalo held a meeting last Wednesday with relatives of six missing persons at City Hall as a way of slowly informing them of the status of their search and retrieval operations.
He told the families that while their operations will continue in order to find their missing relatives, he urged them to check on the unidentified bodies they recovered which are currently being processed by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) in Cebu City, which is collecting DNA samples from 16 body parts recovered at the landslide area.
Dr. Rene Cam, NBI 7 Forensic Division head, said identification of unidentified bodies of landslide victims was done faster compared to in previous disasters that hit Cebu after they allowed secondary parameters to be used in the identification process. Secondary parameters mean using physical aspects of missing persons as a way to identify them, such as tattoos, birthmarks, clothes, jewelry and personal belongings.
Meanwhile, some Cebu City officials personally handed their aid to Mayor Chiong yesterday.
Councilors Raymond Garcia and Renato Osmeña Jr. accompanied the Korean nationals, while Cebu City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office chief Nagiel Bañacia also brought the city’s department heads along with their donations.