Posted on August 1, 2018
DEPARTMENT of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) Secretary Mark Villar on Wednesday, July 25, ordered the deployment of dredging machines to desilt and clear Pampanga River to address the flooding problem in low-lying municipalities in the province.
Villar said that he has ordered the DPWH Central Luzon regional office (DPWH-3) to deploy two dredging machines to desilt Pampanga River in order to improve its water capacity.
“Our purpose here is to assess the effectiveness of this structures in the aftermath of strong typhoons (Henry, Inday and Josie) that battered parts of Luzon and caused flooding in provinces in Central and Northern Luzon,” Villar said.
Villar said that it was Governor Lilia Pineda who requested for the dredging of Pampanga River which she said has served as the catch-basin of floodwaters coming from the uplands of Tarlac and Nueva Ecija.
Governor Pineda cited the plight of Masantol, a coastal town in Pampanga where 26 barangays were submerged in two to five feet of floodwaters and which has been under the state of calamity for one week now.
Some 5,514 families or 25,460 individuals, according to the Municipal Risk Disaster Reduction and Management Council (MRDRMC) were displaced and severely affected by the typhoons.
Villar then proceeded to inspect the recently completed evacuation center in Barangay San Roque, also in Mexico.
The agency saw the urgency to build such disaster-resilient infrastructure designed to have prayer rooms, dining and kitchen areas, breastfeeding room, accommodation room and storage, toilets and bath for male, female, and persons with disabilities to serve as a temporary shelter for the people who were affected by calamities.
He lamented the fact that amidst the thousands of families affected, the evacuation center was wanting of evacuees.
“I think we have to coordinate with the OCD [Office of Civil Defense] with regards to the identification of appropriate sites for evacuation centers. In a way, they must be located adjacent to the flood prone areas,” Villar said.
In that same meeting, the secretary ordered the resolution of problematic infrastructure projects especially those having trouble with the road right-of-way settlement.
For “Not Yet Started Projects” (NYSP), he reminded the district engineers to pay close attention to details especially in planning the forthcoming infrastructure project proposals to decrease the chances of being denied approval and immediately put them into action.
He further instructed the engineers to report at once to the central office any delay in the granting of permits for tree cutting requests from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) and entry permit to local government units especially with big-ticket projects.
He also pointed out that 78 contractors have been identified to have incurred negative slippages in their work and warned project engineers who are serving multi-contractors to the detriment of work accomplishments.
The construction of the Sto. Domingo Bridge and the Sto. Domingo Evacuation Center are among the projects comprising the first wave of the ambitious Build Build Build program.
Source: SunStar
