As the nation marks the second year of Typhoon “Yolanda’s’’ onslaught, vice presidential frontrunner Senator Chiz Escudero on Sunday said that the demands of disaster preparedness, response, relief and rehabilitation required a dedicated agency managed by a cabinet-level official.
Escudero echoed the proposal of presidential bet Senator Grace Poe, who in a resolution she filed in 2013 called for the creation of a department that would focus on disaster risk reduction and management, separate from the Department of National Defense.
“Let’s learn from the painful lessons of Yolanda. There have been issues with regard to the pace of rehabilitation and the mobilization of available financial resources for the victims of Yolanda. It’s been two years since it hit us, and much remains to be done,” lamented the senator.
Escudero, who visited Tacloban and Ormoc last month, said “despite enormous funds allocated by Congress and given by private donors, the housing requirements of our countrymen have yet to be fully addressed.”
“This speaks volumes of the need to have an agency headed by someone who will attend to this full-time,” Escudero said.
Administration presidential candidate Mar Roxas, who was in Tacloban when Yolanda battered the Visayas, has thumbed down Poe’s proposal.
Roxas, who served as vice chairman of NDRMMC while serving as secretary of the Department of the Interior and Local Government, said the “present setup of the government’s disaster preparedness and response has been effective in handling disasters.”
According to Escudero, however, the constant threat posed by natural disasters and the escalating damage caused by these required a thoughtful and thorough review of the current system.
“We are hit by 20 typhoons a year and are vulnerable to earthquakes and volcano eruptions. In Sorsogon and Albay, for example, we experience all that,” said the Bicolano senator.
