DAVAO CITY (MindaNews/11 December) — The Department of Social Welfare and Development in Region 11 has turned over 12 truckloads of relief packs to areas in the Visayas affected by Typhoon Ruby (international name: Hagupit).
In an interview Wednesday, DSWD information officer Carmela Duron said Secretary Dinky Soliman has instructed Regions 10, 11, 12 and Caraga to send 30,000 food packs each to these areas.
Duron said Region 11 was the first among the regions to send food packs to Leyte and Samar.
“Each food pack contains six kilos of rice, four cans of sardines, four cans of corned beef, six packs of noodles and six packs of instant coffee,” she said.
She added the relief packs came from the agency’s standby supply of relief goods, numbering 30,000 at any given time, with two batches of 15,000 each sent to the area since Sunday.
Delivery operations for the relief packs were held at the Department of Public Works and Highways relief depot at Panacan, with personnel from the DSWD continuously repacking goods.
Duron said the agency has a standby funding of P1 million any time, to address emergency situations.
She said a family of four could subsist on the food packs from three to five days.
The agency has hired six wing van trucks for P100,000, adding that the region’s own supply truck augmented the delivery equipment of the agency traveling from various areas of operations in the affected areas.
Construction for the Mindanao hub of the DSWD’s relief warehouse in Bago Oshiro was ongoing. Target date of completion is early 2015.
The three hubs are designed to complement operations of the two other hubs located in Metro Manila and the Visayas in case one area is hit by calamities such as typhoons.
As of December 10, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council has counted nine deaths in Regions 4, 6, 7 and 8.
A total of 532,887 families were affected in regions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, Caraga and NCR, with 389,807 families currently being sheltered in and outside evacuation centers. (MindaNews)
