Sanlakas pickets Mathay on Payatas opening issue

The seemingly unending horror story that is garbage, continues to haunt Quezon City Mayor Ismael Mathay Jr. An accident Friday at the reopened Payatas dump once again stirred up the anger of urban poor residents in the area, and they‘re taking the local chief executive to task for the reported death of 16-year-old scavenger Roggee Baliwas.

This time, it‘s the militant group Sanlakas picketing city hall. Some 100 of their members from communities around the dump trooped to city hall yesterday, faulting Mathay for failed promises of livelihood for victims of the July 10 trash-slide, tragedy which killed at least 234 people and injured scores of others.

"Please, please, let us be reasonable," Mathay pleaded to them. "We’ve been doing all our best to meet all your needs."

As it is, the city government is facing a P1-billion damage suit in the city’s regional trial court in connection with the trash-slide tragedy. Mathay, along with other local government officials, has also been charged with graft in the Office of the Ombudsman.

The mayor said he has run the extra mile just to make sure life would be better for survivors of the tragedy. For example, the national government originally allocated no more than 300 housing units for relocated families from Payatas at the Kasiglahan Village in Rizal. "Through my intercession, I got another 250 more so that we have already relocated 550 families to the site," he said, adding that he has provided livelihood assistance to 1,700 families.

Around 1,000 families still live around the Payatas. Mathay said a multi-sectoral technical working group made up of representatives from communities around the dump and local government officials has been working hard to address the matter.

Last Friday, a slide hit a new mountain of smoldering garbage which has risen beside the collapsed dump when a bulldozer leveling the pile loosened a huge chunk of trash. Baliwas, who was helping his father find recyclables at the dump, was feared to have been buried by the resulting avalanche. Until now, his remains are yet to be found. Two other youngsters were injured by the accident.

"Another mountain of garbage, another tragedy," said Delia Badion, who heads the organization of survivors of the July 10 trash-slide tragedy. The dump was closed after the July 10 tragedy.

Mathay prevailed upon then President Joseph Estrada last Nov. 6 to reopen the dump so the local government could put up a temporary transfer station. The station, he said, would serve as half-way transit point for the city’s garbage trucks making the long haul to the re-commissioned landfill in San Mateo.

Mathay said the station would be shut down once a new landfill in Semirara Island in Antique opens at the start of the new year to take in the garbage generated by the metropolis. But when the Semirara landfill project ran into legal problems, the mayor said he had no choice but to dump garbage again in Payatas. Thus, he said, the transfer station would have to be transformed into a "controlled" garbage dumping operation. He pledged to bar other cities and municipalities in Metro Manila from using the dump as well.

Badion of the July 10 Payatas Victims’ Organization (J10PVO) has another story to tell, however. According to her, the city government had been dumping garbage at what was supposed to be a transfer station in Burias, Group III Payatas, which is adjacent to the collapsed dump when it opened last Nov. 6.