Disaster Preparedness Workshop

Workshop participants discuss and plan activities to be conducted through their various offices before, during, and after a natural disaster.

Ever since we finished our site assessment of the entire municipality at the end of March, my counterpart Bobi and I intended to hold a 'Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan Development Workshop' with members of the municipal staff and officials from all 11 barangays (districts). This workshop would serve as a forum for the leaders of our community to provide their input into the Municipal Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan (MDRRMP) that we are tasked to develop.

Unfortunately, several circumstances beyond our control, including my resignation from Peace Corps and the multitude of fiestas at this time of year, delayed our plans. But after almost two months of planning, we were able to hold our two-day workshop this past Tuesday and Wednesday.

We designed the workshop to be as interactive as possible. Nearly all of the sessions involved group work, where individual communities and/or vocational teams worked together to assess current situations and plan for future activities which can not only render Rosario a more resilient community in the face of natural disaster, but maybe even prevent, or at least mitigate, future disasters from occurring.

In my personal assessment, I am thrilled with how the workshop turned out. Participants were active and engaged throughout all sessions, and provided us with immensely valuable information which will make our MDRRMP more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive. But we weren't without challenges; out of 56 participants, about 10 never showed up and others did not attend the entire workshop. Part of the problem is politics. In this country, a politician in the opposing camp rarely attends an event put on by the mayor's office. But to this issue, there is nothing we can do.

Below are more pictures of the event, likely the most important in my service to Rosario, to give you a better idea on how things proceeded:

Mayor Gerardo 'Tidot' Miranda opens the workshop with his remarks.

The first session of our workshop was devoted to validation of our site assessment. Participants were divided into groups based upon barangays and reviewed our assessments.

Each group then prepared their own charts indicating the most significant risks and the respective vulnerable areas to their communities. Pictured above, a representative from Barangay Aguada presents their chart. 

Part of our planning coming into the workshop involved funding for logistics, such as materials, venue, and food. 

Participants begin to draft community maps of their respective barangay, which could prove useful when planning various DRRM activities.

They color-coded their maps to indicate both physical resources that can be used in the event of an emergency and vulnerable areas particularly at risk to disaster. Not only does this activity provide us with useful information in drafting our plan. It also results in officials becoming more knowledgeable of their own communities in order to better serve their constituency.

Participants also provided us with written assessments of previous natural disasters, indicating how their communities were specifically affected.

Bobi (left) leads a discussion on how various problems likely to occur during a disaster can be solved using local resources. This discussion led me to rehash my previous work as a Water and Sanitation volunteer, providing a quick lesson on how drinking water can be treated safely with locally-available resources. (Here in the Philippines, drinking water is almost exclusively purchased bottled purified water, or natural springs generally safe to drink. If these water sources are contaminated, people genuinely do not have the knowledge on how to proceed.) 

A participant presents her group's detailed map of their community.

One session involved a simulation of the convening of the Municipal Disaster Management Council in the face of an emergency. Bobi read out a mock message from the mayor warning the community of an impending typhoon, and participants met to discuss how each of their offices would respond.

Meanwhile, participants hailing from the barangays, and therefore not part of the council, planned their relief efforts at their local level. 

Participants create their plans of activities to be conducted before, during, and after a disaster. This includes detailing out how exactly these activities will be conducted: who, what, when, where, why, and with what resources.

I took some time to put on my engineer hat and discuss the problems I found repeated over and over again while visiting the barangays. Here, I discussed the importance of maintaining gradual cut slopes. Many homes in hilly terrain, in order to obtain level ground to build upon, cut the hill at a vertical slope, which is highly susceptible to landslides.

Another problem I discussed was maintaining adequate buffers from waterways. Houses are often placed on the riverbanks which are problematic for two primary reasons: 1) These houses are susceptible to collapse due to stream bank erosion undercutting the soil beneath. 2) The construction impedes the flow of water, amplifying flooding upstream.