The chairman of the House Committee on Housing and Urban Development last Sunday urged the National Housing Authority (NHA) to study the filing of criminal charges against all contractors involved in building substandard housing units and facilities for victims of natural and man-made disasters.
Rep. Alfredo B. Benitez of the Third District of Negros Occidental, the panel chairman, said the housing agency should suspend immediately all questionable contractors of the government while preparing for the charges.
The panel is currently looking into irregularities in the development of housing communities for victims of the Zamboanga City siege in 2013.
Benitez, together with Zamboanga City Reps. Beng Climaco and Celso Lobregat, fell into a murky creek in Barangay Rio Hondo when a wooden bridge they were crossing collapsed.
The collapse of the wooden footbridge has prompted the House Committee on Housing and Urban Development to initiate an inquiry into the state of the NHA’s Zamboanga City Roadmap to Recovery and Reconstruction (Z3R) project in Barangay Mariki.
According to the panel, the housing agency spent P12 million for the wooden bridge, which is covered by a five-year warranty before it has to undergo “regular maintenance.”
However, Benitez said the NHA has the responsibility to guarantee the structural integrity of all housing projects financed by the government, whether these are meant for victims of natural or man-made disasters.
The lawmaker added the housing project and facilities built for the Zamboanga siege victims were made of substandard materials.
Responsibility
During the recent hearing of the House Committee on Housing and Urban Development, Engineer Alhazen Sapie, technical consultant of Limestone Construction Development and Corp., has taken full responsibility for the collapse of a wooden footbridge at Rio Hondo village.
Limestone Construction Development and Corp. is the contractor of the housing project for the Zamboanga siege victims.
According to Sapie, the Zamboanga housing project is 95-percent complete and is still undergoing rectification.
Meanwhile, the NHA said the structural components called “cross bracings” had been removed, thereby weakening a portion of the structure that was designed to hold a maximum of 12 adults.
In a position paper submitted to the House panel, the NHA Zamboanga Office said the housing agency discovered that “the portion of the footbridge which collapsed was without the structurally required cross bracings.”
The agency said that “structural components of the wooden bridges like cross bracings” had been “regularly removed by unidentified inhabitants” so that residents could park their bancas in the NHA’s Z3R Housing Project.
“Other cross bracings were removed by parents in order to discourage their children from jumping into the seawaters during high tide, and other inhabitants remove the cross bracings to allow access of their newly repaired and/or constructed bancas into open waters,” the NHA Zamboanga said.
Former NHA General Manager Chito Cruz informed committee that the strength of the wooden footbridge had been “drastically reduced” when the cross bracings were removed.
Cruz also revealed that the specific portion of the wooden footbridge that collapsed only had a “load capacity of seven to eight persons.”
The NHA position paper said, “the number of people which converged on the two frame portion of the bridge numbered around 16 fully adult individuals,” which is more than the “maximum 12 persons for the subject two frames of footbridges.”