House Majority Leader Martin Romualdez on Friday renewed his appeal to the Senate leadership to pass a bill creating the Department Disaster Resilience (DDR) amid the continued unrest of Taal Volcano.
Romualdez, chairman of the House Committee on Rules, recalled that DDR was among President Rodrigo Duterte’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) priority measures.
The bill, he said, should be passed before the 2022 national elections.
Meanwhile, Taal Volcano in Batangas maintained its Alert Level 3, following five short phreatomagmatic bursts and 58 volcanic earthquakes recorded in the past 24 hours, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said.
High levels of volcanic sulfur dioxide or SO2 gas emissions and steam-rich plumes that rose 1,200 meters before drifting northwest were generated from the Taal main crater.
Sulfur dioxide emission averaged 6,095 tons per day on July 8.
The public is reminded that the entire Taal Volcano Island is a permanent danger zone, and entry into the island as well as into the high-risk barangays of Agoncillo and Laurel must be prohibited due to the hazards of pyroclastic density currents and volcanic tsunami should strong eruptions occur. All activities on Taal Lake should not be allowed at this time.
Romualdez said the country needed a department that would focus on rehabilitation efforts and improve the government’s rehabilitation capacity.
“Much work is expected of us in the 18th Congress until the 2022 elections. But one of the bills that I wish to be enacted into law is DDR. I intend to seek our senators’ help to get this measure approved before our term expires especially now with the continued unrest of Taal Volcano,” said Romualdez, who represents Tacloban City — the most hit part of Eastern Visayas during the onslaught of super typhoon Yolanda on November 8, 2013.
Romualdez and his wife, Tingog party-list Rep. Yedda Marie Romualdez, chairperson of the House Committee on Welfare of Children, are among the principal authors of House Bill 5989 pushing for the creation of the DDR.
Several bills on DDR are still pending before the Senate Committees on National Defense and Security and Peace, Unification and Reconciliation.
Romualdez, president of the Lakas Christian Muslim Democrats (CMD), said the country needs a primary government institution that would be responsible for ensuring safe, adaptive, and disaster resilient communities.
“We must not mobilize government resources only when a calamity is about to strike or after a disaster has ravaged entire communities. The Department of Disaster Resilience will provide leadership in the continuous development of strategic and systemic approaches to disaster prevention, mitigation preparedness response, recovery, and rehabilitation,” Romualdez said.
“We all saw the horrors brought by Typhoon Yolanda. I witnessed the destruction it wrought to our communities in Eastern Visayas. I experienced the pain felt by thousands of families who lost their loved ones. Yolanda was a tragedy that should never happen again,” he added.
Under the bill, the DDR may undertake and implement certain emergency measures in anticipation of, during, and in the aftermath of disasters to protect and preserve life and property and ensure and promote public safety and welfare.
Among these emergency measures are carrying out preemptive and forced evacuation; imposition of curfew; and temporary take over of any private utility or business, subject to payment of just compensation when there is imminent danger of loss of lives or damage to property.
The proposed law also establishes the National Disaster Operations Center, Alternative Command Centers, and Disaster Resilience Research and Training Institute.
The NDOC is a physical center equipped with the necessary tools and systems to monitor, manage, and respond to disasters in all areas of the country, while the ACCs are command centers that would provide supplemental support to the NDOC.
The DRRTI, meanwhile, is a platform for providing training preferably on site, and for collecting, consolidating, managing, analyzing, and sharing knowledge and information to improve or enhance disaster resilience.