Calm after the storm

Five years after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: Haiyan) flattened the eastern Visayas region, survivors are still struggling to obtain decent housing.

While many are still living in makeshift shanties as they await relocation, those who had received their units have complained of substandard houses that could be destroyed  even by the slightest earthquake.

President Duterte was likewise unhappy over the sluggish transfer of families displaced by Yolanda. When he visited Tacloban City in January 2017, he gave concerned agencies until March of the same year to make sure all survivors will have their permanent shelters.

The National Housing Authority (NHA), however, failed to meet the deadline.

Dorcas Secreto, NHA Eastern Visayas regional estate management specialist, said bad weather prevented the agency from meeting the President’s deadline, but he gave assurances that the agency would be able to deliver the remaining 2,700 housing units before the end of April 2017 so these could be turned over to beneficiaries.

At least 16 million people in 44 provinces were affected when Yolanda wreaked havoc on Nov. 8, 2013.

Yolanda, the world’s strongest typhoon to hit land, packed sustained winds of 235 km per hour. It left 6,300 dead, mostly by drowning, 28,689 injured and 1,062 missing.

More than 1 million families, or about 5.13 million people, were evacuated at the height of the typhoon, which damaged 1.14 million houses. Total cost of damage was placed at P95.5 billion.

Survivors’ struggles

In its three-part special report five years after the supertyphoon’s onslaught, Inquirer’s Visayas bureau revisited Tacloban City, Yolanda’s ground zero, to learn the survivors’ struggles in acquiring new homes.

Some of them refused to move into the units because they felt unsafe in the flimsy houses.

“It’s like being hit by Yolanda again. There is no day when they don’t fear for their lives and the lives of their children,” said Efleda Bautista, one of the founders of People Surge, an organization of Yolanda survivors.

Secreto dismisses claims that the houses are substandard, saying the designs and specifications were submitted by the contractors to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) for scrutiny and approval.

She added that the complaints about wobbling and cracking walls are just “construction defects [that] can be repaired.”

Meanwhile, in Concepcion town in Iloilo province, separate investigations by the DPWH and the engineering offices of the province and of the town have found that the houses at Bacjawan People’s Village Site No. 1 did not meet the required project specification of 3,000 psi (pounds per square inch).

“Failure to meet this requirement is very hazardous, as it puts at risk the lives of the occupants,” DPWH engineers said in their report dated June 19.

Other beneficiaries wondered how some families obtained more than one house unit.

Tacloban’s City Housing and Community Development Office (CHCDO) has conducted a revalidation after learning that 138 people received more than one house each.

CHCDO said the duplication happened because the NHA did not coordinate with the CHCDO and furnished the office a copy of the list of the beneficiaries only this year.

The list indicated the names of the families who had been transferred to the resettlement sites, all located in the northern portion of the city, starting December 2016, when the NHA began a “massive transfer” of beneficiaries.

As of October, 11,466 families have been relocated to the 15 government-initiated relocation sites in Tacloban City.

Another 1,655 families separately received houses from different private and humanitarian organizations, while the city government has identified 14,433 families who still need to be relocated.

COA report

In its annual audit report released in August, the Commission on Audit (COA) found that only 41 percent (84,295) of the 205,128 houses for the typhoon victims had been completed in Tacloban City and other provinces.

Of that number, only 28,395 houses, or 34 percent, had been occupied. The rest—55,900 houses, or 66 percent—had not been completed.

Among the reasons for the delay in the completion of the houses, according to the COA, are lack of basic facilities, incomplete structural components and construction defects.

The agency also found irregular the award of P654.6 million worth of housing projects for Yolanda survivors to an unnamed contractor whose license did not authorize it to take on such big-ticket projects.

Auditors found that adjacent projects in the three sites—the towns of Balangiga, Hernani and Quinapondan in Eastern Samar—were split into eight smaller contracts to “accommodate” the developer, whose Philippine Contractors Accreditation    Board license authorized it to secure construction deals worth only as much as P100 million.

COA also found that 10 Yolanda Permanent Housing Program projects, worth P852.7 million, progressed very slowly because the NHA awarded contracts to a developer that had few workers and equipment.

The NHA, in its response to the COA, admitted that the sufficiency of the contractor’s manpower and equipment was “not fully monitored.”

But it added that it had been stricter in enforcing the manpower and equipment requirements as well as requests for extension of deadlines.

In May, the NHA sought the termination of 46 unfinished housing projects for Yolanda survivors because of problems in the deployment of resources such as manpower and supplies and for getting a negative slippage of more than 15 percent.

Under the government procurement law, no project should incur a delay of more than the 15-percent slippage rate.

NHA records also showed the government was trying to construct houses in 119 project sites spread across the provinces of Aklan, Antique, Capiz, Iloilo, Negros Occidental, Cebu, Leyte, Easter Samar, Samar, Biliran,  Palawan and Tacloban City.

Of the 205,128 units that the NHA had targeted to build, only 92,088 had been completed. However, only 59,420 units had been occupied, according to records from the housing agency.

The COA also scored the failure of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to successfully construct 3,200 “transitional shelters” for Yolanda survivors, amounting P201 million, despite the grant of an extension of more than a year, from August 2014 to December 2015.

Built in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the project was supposed to provide temporary shelters for families displaced by the 2013 typhoon in Samar, Eastern Samar and Leyte provinces, while they await permanent relocation.

Sources: NDRRMC and Inquirer Archives