Guinsaugon remembered

Below is a reprint of our editorial commemorating the first anniversary of the Guinsaugon Tragedy that killed over 2000 people. We are publishing it so that Southern Leytenos will remember and not let it happen again.

On February 17 2006 at exactly 10:36 a.m. the western slope of Mount Kan-Abag in Saint Bernard collapsed and buried barangay Guinsaugon in over a hundred feet of mud and boulders the size of dump trucks.

In less than six seconds the avalanche ended the hopes and dreams of over 2000 people there and transformed one of the province’s richest agricultural village into a mass grave yard. Among its victims were 256 elementary school children, their 7 teachers, and a group of 80 mothers who were planning the town’s “Mother’s Month” program. It was the worst disaster in Southern Leyte’s history.

The Mines and Geosciences Bureau quickly blamed the disaster on a 2.6 magnitude earthquake, and on massive soil erosion due to excessive rains. But residents there know the real cause were the commercial loggers and their CENRO coddlers who had ravaged the rain forests there to near extinction.

They claimed that since time immemorial the town had been drenched with what they amply called siyam-siyam; or nine days and nights of continuous heavy rains. Yet there were no landslides of the Guinsaugon magnitude until now, because the mountain’s trees held its steep slope together.

In the landslides aftermath, Southern Leyte was quickly declared the “Country’s Second Most Landslide Prone Province in the Country” by the MGB, and 10 of its 18 towns were classified as Disaster Zones. 

The survivors of the tragedy have since been relocated several kilometers from the disaster site and given cement houses financed by donors from around the world. While some were trained in alternative livelihoods so they could earn a living.

But most of the people of Guinsaugon were successful farmers and have now been deprived of the vocation they know because their rice fields have been declared off limits. What’s the use of providing homes for the refugees there when they have lost their source of livelihood, and with it their pride, since they must now depend on handouts to survive?

We should reforest Mount Kan-Abag ASAP to prevent the recurrence of mega-landslides there and jail the big time logger who is still cutting-down the remaining hardwood trees there for his boat building enterprise. The CENRO in San Juan knows who he is, and so does the PNP. All they need is the courage to charge him in court for his heinous crime.

Reliable sources claim that two truckloads of hardwood lumber bound for the logger’s boat yard were intercepted by a PNP-ENRO team months before the Guinsaugon disaster. But he was cleared because he produced a CENRO permit for his contraband. He even had the audacity to file a complaint against the team members for “grave abuse of authority.”

Instead of building shrines commemorating our lack of foresight and political will - shouldn’t we address the root cause of the landslide itself?

In the final analysis the best thing we can do for the Guinsaugon survivors is to make sure their worst nightmare doesn’t happen again.(By Mark Rimas)

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