EDITORIAL - No quick response

The coconut plantations will take years to recover, and livelihoods have yet to return to normal. Many families are still housed in tent shelters or flimsy temporary homes. Buildings and infrastructure are still being rebuilt, with disaster resilience supposed to be designed into the construction. The official body count from Super Typhoon Yolanda, which struck the country two years ago this month, stopped at over 6,000, but local officials believe the initial estimate that cost a police commander his post – about 10,000.

There was an avalanche of donations from the international community and local sources after Yolanda devastated the Visayas. Yet the Commission on Audit has found that donations failed to reach the disaster victims while the bulk of so-called quick-response funds or QRF went to operational expenses of government relief agencies or else sat in a bank.

The COA audited utilization of the QRF by the Office of Civil Defense and P48.82 million in donations received by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, which the OCD administers. The OCD, which is under the Department of National Defense, was allocated P692.77 million in QRF after Yolanda. Government auditors learned that P121.8 million or about 17 percent of the QRF for 2013 went to operational expenses of the OCD. The rest of the QRF is in a bank.

A 1998 memorandum of the disaster council allows families to claim P10,000 in assistance for every member killed and P5,000 for the injured. But the COA learned that new rules made it difficult for victims to meet the requirements for filing a claim for cash assistance. Earlier, certain foreign groups supporting rehabilitation projects also complained about the complicated rules that slowed down relief and reconstruction in the Yolanda-hit areas.

From the start, critics have noted that the government’s response to Yolanda has been as disastrous as the killer typhoon. The COA report should be an eye-opener for the administration to improve the rehabilitation effort. The Quick Relief Fund should be just that: quickly utilized, and providing relief for disaster victims.