Court orders QC gov’t to pay families of trash slide victims

A Quezon City court has ordered the city government to pay the families of the persons who died during the collapse of the mountain of garbage in Barangay Payatas almost 20 years ago.

In a 133-page decision, the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 97 ordered the local government to pay the legal heirs of 59 victims of the garbage collapse ₱110,000 each.

The amount is broken down to

₱50,000 in temperate damages,

₱50,000 in moral damages, and

₱10,000 in exemplary or corrective damages.

Aside from this, the court also ordered the Quezon City government to pay ₱100,000 in attorney’s fees.

However, no actual damages were awarded because the court said there was no evidence of prior existence of their buried properties and the funeral expenses for the victims.

The court cleared the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), Tofemi Realty Corporation and Meteor Company, Inc., which owned the land used as the dumpsite; and Ren Transport, one of the haulers of garbage to Payatas, of liabilities.

The legal heirs of the victims claimed that a “huge and strong inferno-like garbage avalanche” buried more than 300 people alive on July 10, 2000.

The dumpsite was located near the relocation site in Lupang Pangako, Payatas.

Despite being shut down in 1998, the site was reopened despite complaints of the residents.

“The mountain-like trash in itself is a testament of the city government’s gross negligence in the management and operation of the dumpsite,” Acting Presiding Judge Marilou Runes-Tamang wrote in the ruling. “Had they exercised due care expected of them, they could not have allowed the garbage to rise to such unprecedented height as to resemble several Meralco posts arranged on top of each other or several storeys-high of a building,” the court said.