The City Council, during last Monday’s regular session, approved on first reading the proposed safe zone homes ordinance in the city.
Under the proposed measure authored by Councilor Leandro B. Yangot, Jr., it aims to promote and protect the safety, peace, comfort and convenience and general welfare of the inhabitants in the city; it also is geared towards preventing undue accidents or death of inhabitants in risk-prone areas; prevent congestion and over population within the townsite area and regulate the area and the use of land and height of buildings to ensure public safety.
The ordinance covers all private and government properties, housing, apartments and boarding or transient houses.
The ordinance tasked the City Buildings and Architecture Office (CBAO), to facilitate efficiently the inspection of buildings pursuant to the National Building Code where the building official shall be primarily responsible for the enforcement of the provisions of the measure as well as of the implementing rules and regulations issued for the purpose.
For the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), it is mandated to conduct geohazard assessment and information dissemination or campaign; generate information on susceptibility of areas to geologic hazards where the assessment will be focused in rain-induced landslides, floods, flash floods, ground subsidence or sinking, and other forms of slope instabilities that are not directly induced by earthquakes or volcanic activities; massive campaign to disseminate the digitized geohazard maps and provide the necessary technical inputs to the city government for the updating and modification of the comprehensive land use plan, project development and disaster preparedness, management and mitigation programs.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) shall provide information to collectively understand the influence of local site conditions, as well as the effect of topography in the resulting ground motion levels for the city in the event of an earthquake while the City Planning and Development Office (CPDO) shall strictly implement and check the compliance of all applications with the city comprehensive zoning ordinance.
Further, the City Engineering Office (CEO) is mandated to conduct on-site inspection and assessment to determine compliance of the project to standards and specifications.
The ordinance claims that the use of land in the city and how infrastructure and buildings are designed and constructed all influences exposure to physical hazards and the rise or fall of a city’s stock of risk.
Based on the Global Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, the global population living in informal settlements is currently estimated at approximately one billion people, many of whom live in hazard-prone areas where the said population is growing at about 40 million people each year.
In the Philippine setting, the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center cl.0⁹in 2019 that the country ranked third among all the countries with the highest risk worldwide where about 60 percent of the country’s total land area is exposed to multiple hazards and 74 percent of the population is susceptible to their impact.
