Pr oj e c tNOAH Ope nFi l eRe por t s

Vol. 1 (2013), pp. 1-2, ISSN 2362 7409

What hit Barangay Andap, New Bataan, Compostela Valley (Initial Assessment)I AMF Lagmaya,b,∗, RN Ecoa,b , J Alconisa , B Salvioa a Nationwide b National

Operational Assessment of Hazards, Department of Science and Technology, Philippines Institute of Geological Sciences, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

Abstract On 4 December 2012, typhoon Pablo (international name Bopha) made landfall over the Philippine island of Mindanao. More than 44,437 families were evacuated in Mindanao and in the Visayas Region, Central Philippines. Despite advanced warnings and preparations by communities against the tropical cyclone, Pablo exacted heavy damage in Mindanao with 459 deaths, 532 missing and 4.17 billion pesos worth of damage to infrastructure and agriculture. Heavy rains brought by typhoon Pablo spawned floods that carried eroded gravel, sand and boulders from the mountains. Barangay Andap, in New Bataan, was overwhelmed by a rapid downward moving mass of material composed of boulders, gravel and sand and fluid as wet cement. In its wake, it left a pile of rubble called a debris flow deposit. Keywords: New Bataan, Bopha, debris flow

1. Introduction On 4 December 2012, typhoon Pablo (international name Bopha) made landfall over the Philippine island of Mindanao, a year after tropical storm Sendong (International name Washi) devastated the same island. Hardest hit by Sendong were the cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro where 1268 lives and 1.6 billion pesos worth of property were lost [1]. Classified as a Category 5 typhoon by US meteorological experts, Pablo packed winds with average speeds of 185 km/hr and gusts reaching 210 km/hour. Typhoon Pablos eye crossed Mindanao through Davao Oriental, Compostela Valley, Agusan del Sur, Bukidnon, and Misamis Oriental. It continued west-northwest to Negros Oriental, then to Sulu Sea, crossing Palawan before reaching the West Philippine Sea where it is now as of the time of this writing. More than 44,437 families were evacuated in Mindanao and in the Visayas Region, Central Philippines. Despite advanced warnings and preparations by communities against the tropical cyclone, Pablo exacted heavy damage in Mindanao with 459 deaths, 532 missing and 4.17 billion pesos worth of damage to infrastructure and agriculture. The region with the most number of recorded deaths is Compostela Valley, Mindanao, with 236 fatalities. Davao Oriental follows with 180 dead, recovered mostly from the coastal town of Baganga, where typhoon Pablo made landfall. The municipality of New Bataan in Compostela Valley has 115 casualties where Barangay Andap is situated.

Figure 1: What was once the center of Barangay Andap in New Bataan, Compostela Valley province is now a new riverbed with an estimated width of nearly a kilometer stretching up to eight kilometers down to the town proper. Typhoon Pablo brought flashflood in this town on Tuesday, leaving over a hundred persons killed and hundreds still missing. Mindanews Photo by Ruby Thursday.

2. Debris flows Barangay Andap is gone, buried in a pile of rocks the size of boulders (Figure 1). The village was overwhelmed by a rapid downward moving mass of material composed of boulders, gravel and sand and fluid as wet cement. In its wake, it left a pile of rubble called a debris flow deposit. When debris flows happen in volcanic slopes, they are called lahars. In 2006, Typhoon Durian (international code name Reming) generated lahars that left deposits similar to those that now cover Barangay Andap. Within and on top of the deposit, there lay boulders strewn on top of the debris field (Figure 3). In December 1999, heavy rains spawned floods and landslides in Cordillera de la Costa, Vargas, Venezuela, a densely

I Published online on 8 December 2012 at http://blog.noah.dost.gov.ph/2012/12/08/what-hit-barangay-andap-newbataan-compostela-valley-initial-assessment/ ∗ Corresponding author Email addresses: [email protected] (AMF Lagmay), [email protected] (RN Eco), [email protected] (J Alconis), [email protected] (B Salvio)

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Figure 2: Village along the footslopes of Mayon Volcano covered by lahar deposits generated by rains of typhoon Durian.

Figure 4: Debris flow diagram [2].

Figure 3: Debris flow damage in Cordillera de la Costa, Vargas, Venezuela Source: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/

Figure 5: Location of Andap and low resolution flood hazard map of Project NOAH. Misfit of the hazard map with the topography is due to the poor resolution of elevation data.

populated city located on an alluvial fan at the mouth of a mountain drainage, near the base of steeply-sided mountains. Debris flows overwhelmed Cordillera de la Costa, Vargas, and destroyed 700 apartment buildings and 800 houses (Figure 3). A total of 19,000 people died from the catastrophe [3]. The definition of debris flows is the rapid, downward mass movement of particles coarser than sand, often including boulders one meter or more in diameter, at a rate ranging from 2 to 40 kilometers per hour [4]. Debris flows occur along fairly steep slopes. It can also refer to the material that descends in such a flow. A debris flow would look something like what is shown in the diagram (Figure 4). Heavy rains brought by typhoon Pablo spawned floods that carried eroded gravel, sand and boulders from the mountains. Like in Cordillera de la Costa, Barangay Andap is situated at the mouth of a mountain drainage network at the base of steeplysided slopes. It was nested on an alluvial fan, normally found at the base of mountains where water drains. As what happened

in the catastrophic debris flow event in Cordillera de la Costa, Barangay Andap was situated along the path of a debris flow spawned by intense rainfall during the onslaught of typhoon Pablo. References [1] NDRRMC, Online, accessed at: http://ndrrmc.gov.ph/attachments/ article/ 835/ UPDATE (2011). [2] M. Jacob, A size classification for debris flows, Engineering Geology 79 (2005) 151–161. [3] M. C. Larsen, M. T. Vasquez-Conde, R. A. Clark, Flash-flood related hazards: landslides, with examples from the december, 1999 disaster in venezuela, in E. Gruntfest and J. Handmer, eds., Coping with Flash floods, Kluwer Academic Publishers (2001) 259–275. [4] D. of Geology, Dictionary of geology, Online, accessed at: http://www.alcwin.org/Dictionary Of Geology Description-110-D.htm (2006).

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