An estimated 50 people are feared missing after another landfill in the Philippines collapsed at 2pm local time (10am UAE time) Saturday afternoon in a town near the capital Manila.
The incident happened at 1B Harangan, San Isidro, Montalban, Rizal. Initial reports said 100 people are affected, about half of whom remain unaccounted for as of Sunday morning.
The University of the Philippines student newspaper Philippine Collegian broke the news and reported that no coordinated rescue operation is being conducted by the local government of Rodriguez, Rizal province, adjacent to Metro Manila.
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The campus publication said the landfill operator, International Solid Waste Integrated Management Specialist Inc. (ISWIMS), is preventing journalists and residents from seeking information about the incident.
Local media networks ABS-CBN and GMA News issued a report on Sunday afternoon confirming the trashslide. Three backhoe vehicles triggered the collapse, burying the victims, reports said.
Local government authorities have yet to issue a statement on the reported incident, Sunday being a weekend holiday in the Philippines.
Before Saturday’s incident, the community of scavengers beside the landfill had been threatened with demolition, potentially making 1,000 families homeless, the Collegian reported.
Four people died in the last trash slide in Rodriguez in April 2013.
Philippine landfills are operated by private companies such as ISWIMS that employ workers to dump and sift mountains of garbage.
Scavengers are usually present in the landfills to gather plastics and paper thrash they sell to junkshops.
Rodriguez’s once lush mountains and valleys have been turned into trash landfills for most of Metro Manila’s cities, replacing Payatas Landfill in nearby Quezon City that permanently closed in 2017.
The Rodriguez trash slide may prove deadlier than the Binaliw landfill tragedy in Cebu City last January 8 that killed 36 workers.
The Cebu tragedy was blamed on unsafe practices by the private contractor, such as cutting into accumulated waste, reshaping the garbage pile over time, and extracting soil before stacking waste anew, resulting in unstable mounds.
Residents have reported foul odours, untreated wastewater, and possible water contamination affecting Barangay Binaliw and nearby Panoypoy village in Consolacion town.
On July 10, 2000, the Payatas Landfill in Quezon City collapsed, killing at least 218 people. About 300 people remain missing. Some accounts say that 700 to about 1,000 were the actual casualties. The victims were scavengers who also lived on the mountains of Metro Manila’s garbage.
