BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—Eighteen foreign experts are testing counter-erosion measures using bamboo and rocks on mountainsides hit by landslides during last year’s typhoons.
Swedish architect Ingemar Savfors has designed gabions shaped from bamboo that participants in an international disaster-risk management workshop will introduce to damaged hillsides in the community of Little Kibungan in La Trinidad, Benguet.
A gabion is a steel box or basket that is stacked up to form a reinforcement wall to hold back eroded hillsides.
A massive landslide triggered by Typhoon “Pepeng” on October 8 last year killed 77 people in Little Kibungan.
Mt. Province, which also suffered from Pepeng’s wrath, has been using gabions made of river stone and clay.
Savfors said his design uses indigenous materials common in areas exposed to risks of landslides.
Bamboo, he said, can be shaped into arches to form baskets to be filled with rocks and set against eroded mountain sides on buried poles.
“Steel is expensive and may need to be imported. Bamboo is abundant. There may be issues about its [durability before natural decay sets in], but we can infuse the bamboo with fungi [so it could last for three to four years],” Savfors said.
The bamboo gabions would hold loose mountain soil long enough to give natural vegetation time to grow roots and stabilize a landslide-hit area, he said.
He said the angle and arch of the bamboo baskets also help redirect runoff water and help ease the impact of heavy rainfall on loose soil.
The tests fit a proposal from Benguet environmentalists to convert the Little Kibungan landslide area in Barangay Puguis into a bamboo nature park.
Dr. Rogelio Colting, head of the Cordillera Bamboo Development Council and president of Benguet State University, said a park filled with bamboo suits the damaged terrain, owing to bamboo’s supposed ability to stop erosion.
The risk management experts are inspecting this week three other eroded communities here and in Benguet.
Per Andersson, emergency engineering manager of the advocacy group Concern Worldwide, hosted the workshop, saying the group selected Baguio City because disasters are “all here.”
He cited the city’s experience with an earthquake, typhoons and strong rains that bring floods and erosion.
“There’s a lot for us to learn from Baguio,” he said.
Participants came from the United Kingdom, Cambodia, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Liberia and Kenya.
This was not the first time Baguio became a case study. Shortly after the 1990 Luzon earthquake, European and Asian experts helped design new urban development plans for Baguio and Dagupan City in Pangasinan, using new information on geology, population management and energy management.
Andersson said the case studies his group intends to collect should help change government response to disasters.
“There should be a culture of prevention,” he said.
Ray Tagdi, a government engineer assigned to Benguet, said work crews have introduced bioengineering measures along sections of major roads that have yet to be repaired, including Halsema Highway.
“We used coconut fiber web to stabilize roads,” he said.
But the government’s chief concern now is how to resettle residents of Little Kibungan.
Anne Dodon, organizer of a community group in Barangay Puguis, said typhoon and landslide survivors were ready for relocation because Little Kibungan had been declared a danger zone.
They, however, wanted to be compensated for the land they would abandon. Vincent Cabreza and Frank Cimatu, Inquirer Northern Luzon
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