A
alchemy
Guest
Lest people think that mendacious government officials & purposely inept policies are unique to the US (or UK), here is another example:
John
Cheers,NYT said:Danger of Philippine Landslides Often Ignored, Critics Say
By CARLOS H. CONDE
GUINSAUGON, Philippines, Tuesday, Feb. 21 — According to official records, the government of the Philippines knew as early as last May that this village in the eastern part of the country, where more than 1,000 people may have died in a landslide Friday, was in grave danger.
Policies were even in place to avert a pending disaster: area villages were evacuated late last year and a logging ban, to address the deforestation that helped cause the problem, had been adopted more than a decade ago.
But reality was another matter. Many residents soon returned to their homes. According to government officials and environmental groups, problems ranging from government corruption and ineffective laws to a lack of money and the political will to enforce the laws contributed to the collapse of the mountainside here in the first place, and allowed it to become a large-scale human tragedy.
"This is a failure of the implementation of laws and a failure of policy," said Von Hernandez, the campaign director for Southeast Asia of the environmental group Greenpeace, which had warned the government last month that its current policies were bound for trouble.
On Tuesday, rescue workers continued to dig through the muck in an increasingly hopeless search for survivors. Hopes had been raised Monday afternoon when electronic sensors detected tapping sounds believed to be signs of life. But diggers found nothing but bodies and by midnight, the tapping had vanished.
By Tuesday morning, the official body count had increased to 84, with about 1,000 victims still believed to be beneath the mud.
Even as the rescue work continued, political leaders were already issuing recriminations and demanding reform, noting that hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, still living in more than 1,000 government-identified danger zones, remained at risk.
The government had determined last May that St. Bernard, the township to which this village belongs, was one of the danger zones, prone to natural disaster, and placed it on a geological hazard map. Fracturing volcanic rocks and weathering made the area "unstable and susceptible to mass movement," the environment department said in a statement over the weekend.
Hundreds of residents were ordered to evacuate. But almost immediately, they began to trickle back. The problem, said Michael Defensor, a key adviser to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and, until a few weeks ago, the environment secretary, was that the displaced people had no access to their farms or businesses. "The residents would go back to their villages," he said.
Critics said the government should not have allowed residents to return. "If residents refuse to evacuate, that's where political will on the part of the government comes in," said Mr. Hernandez of Greenpeace.
But the government declined to act, said Crispin Beltran, a member of Congress. "Why was there a severe lack of massive reforestation program and disaster response system?" he asked. "Why was it that only a measly 0.1 percent of the national budget was allotted to calamity funds despite all the signs of impending tragedies?"
Clemente Bautista, an official of Kalikasan, a local environmental group, told The Philippine Daily Inquirer over the weekend that the Arroyo administration had failed to implement its own recommendations for St. Bernard, like massive reforestation and an early warning system.
Local officials said they had detected what looked like fractures on the side of the mountain months before the tragedy, but they said no one thought it was serious enough to do anything about it.
The underlying problem of deforestation also reflected policy failures, critics said.
"The real reason for this terrible tragedy is that forests have been badly denuded and no serious replanting has been done," Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales of Manila said in a statement on Sunday. "It is time for the powers that be to address strongly these issues."
But the logging ban already in place is widely seen as ineffective. Endemic corruption, lack of resources and weak law enforcement have allowed illegal logging to flourish and environmental predators to go unpunished, critics said.
And politically, whoever sits in the presidential palace must reckon with the nation's political dynasties, several of which earned their wealth and power through logging, Mr. Hernandez said.
In late 2005, for instance, the environment department allowed the resumption of logging by a company owned by a senator who is an ally of the president, over the objections of residents and religious leaders. The logging concession was within a national forest reserve.
But Mr. Defensor, the former environment secretary, said the government should not be held accountable for failing to anticipate disasters. "The government is doing its best under the circumstances," he said. "We cannot relocate everyone at the same time, but measures can be put in place. And this can be done as soon as possible."
On Sunday, President Arroyo called for action. "We should all join hands in the preservation of our environment and protect what is left behind for the sake of the generations to come," she said in a national address. On Monday, she ordered the release of money to upgrade the country's geographical hazard maps.
John