TACLOBAN CITY—The ongoing public hearing of the House Committee on Housing and Urban Development on the implementation by the National Housing Authority (NHA) of the Yolanda-shelter program is drawing much interest in Eastern Visayas, the ground zero of the supertyphoon.
The public hearing is closely being followed on cable television, spot reports over the radio stations and even livestream over Internet. Thanks to technology, communities in the town of Balangiga in Eastern Samar, where the poor condition of housing units became the subjects of scrutiny, can monitor the discussion.
The poor condition of the different housing projects in Eastern Samar, and even in this city, is a common knowledge that made the NHA regional office a subject of ridicule on social and mass media.
So when Juanito Tayag, owner of contracting company JC Tayag Builders, denied the houses constructed in Eastern Samar were substandard, many could only gasp in disbelief.
“I won’t dare live in that house because it could not guarantee the safety of my children when a disaster comes,” said 45-year old Ellen Magno, a mother of three children living on a coastal village in Balangiga, where JC Tayag Builders is the contractor of the housing project.
“I was with the group that inspected the house construction and I saw for myself how the houses shake when you push the wall,” Magno said. “Even the hollow blocks are of poor quality; they easily crumble.”
Magno is one of the signatories of a “notice of refusal” that shelter beneficiaries in her village submitted to NHA, citing among other reasons the inferior workmanship and questionable structural integrity of the constructed houses for survivors of Yolanda who are living on so-called danger zones.
The refusal of residents on the houses prompted the regional office of National Economic Development Authority (Neda) to conduct an audit on NHA houses on July 19. Initial report showed the houses were found to be “poorly built” due to “use of shallow wall footing and brittle hollow blocks”. Neda findings also noted the “absence of field monitoring engineer due to resignation”.
The Neda initial report also pointed out the insufficient size of beams that prompted the NHA to order the contractor to rectify it.
During the congressional hearing, Tayag admitted the issue of substandard construction happened only in one project site in Balangiga. “However, they declared the construction in Eastern Samar as a whole is substandard,” Tayag said.
Non-governmental organizations assisting the Yolanda survivors in the rehabilitation, however, claimed the problem on substandard manner of construction is prevalent in many projects in Eastern Samar, rather an isolated case.
“Contrary to the logic contractor Tayag claimed, prudence dictates that if one of the sites is proven substandard, then it follows that the rest are suspect,” said Rina Reyes, regional coordinator of Rights Network, a member of the Coalition of Yolanda Survivors and Partners. “It is up to Tayag and the government to prove that these units are safe for Yolanda survivors.”
Alberto Acosta, a barangay captain in the town of Guiuan, also complained of inferior quality of houses that were built for them.
“Many houses had cracks on their walls after a strong earthquake hit Mindanao last year. NHA told us to repaint the walls so that the cracks will not show,” he said.
Edwin Torres, president of a homeowners’ association of Yolanda survivors in Tacloban, said issues on quality of houses should have been resolved earlier had the government listened to the complaints of the affected people.
“We have been incessantly complaining but our complaints are not being heard,” he said. “The government’s failure to listen to survivors created a new more complex problem such as substandard houses, housing without social services, and other problems. The specter of ghost towns is now more real because of these issues,” he said.