WHILE all national roads are passable in Batangas and Cavite, the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) has closed three road sections as part of the 14-kilometer radius danger zone imposed by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs).
Anna Mae Y. Lamentillo, the chairman for the “Build, Build, Build” (BBB) program of the administration, listed the three road sections as the Tanauan-Talisay-Tagaytay Road, the Talisay-Laurel-Agoncillo Road and the Agoncillo Section.
“The entire stretch is now closed to traffic,” she said at Monday’s BusinessMirror Coffee Club, fielding questions from journalists in the ALC Media Group. “We have evacuated more than 50,000 people already and have deployed water trucks to clean national highways, deploying 100 equipment and about 600 employees.”
Lamentillo noted that her group can only “rehabilitate areas outside the 14-kilometer danger zone.”
As this developed, Lamentillo’s group is currently finishing studies for road and bridge construction that are more “science-based” and disaster-proof.
“Since we assumed position, we commissioned a lot of studies not just in earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, even flooding.
We really thought that flooding and traffic cannot be solved by politics alone. The Philippines is in a unique position because almost all our road networks are near the fault line, so we really have to build sustainably to make sure that the gaps are plugged,” she said.
Image credits: Roy Domingo