Cebu Provincial Legal Officer Orvi Ortega will pursue to remove the Cebu Provincial government as one of the defendants of the PhP 4.5 billion environmental class action suit following a landslide in Naga City in September 2018.
The victims’ families tagged the Cebu Provincial government together with Apo Land and Quarry Corporation (ALQC); Apo Cement Corp. and Cemex Holdings Philippines Inc.; Mines and Geosciences Bureau in Central Visayas (MGB-7); and the Naga City government.
The class suit was filed by the families of the victims from the said misfortune in a quarry site last year that had taken a toll in Barangay Tinaan in Naga City on September 20, 2018. Residents blamed the landslide on the quarrying activity of ALQC that used to supply for Apo Cement, a cement manufacturing plant in Naga City.
The landslide devastated a total of 80 hectares of nearby area and took the lives of 78 people and displacing 444 families in the aftermath. In addition to the hundreds of families prohibited from coming back to their homes, another group of over a thousand families were also forced out of the one-kilometer radius of the landslide’s ground zero.
The plaintiffs are seeking actual and moral damages for the victims, rehabilitation funds for the landslide area, and the discontinuing of quarry operations in the mountains of Naga City.
The lead counsel of the landslide victims, Environmental lawyer Benjamin Cabrido, explained that the province of Cebu would only be asked to assess the limits of the province’s mainland and surrounding islands ability to sustain quarrying operations through a study that will be conducted if the court sides with the complainants.
However, Ortega insisted that this course of action can be done by simply making a request to the capitol without any legal proceedings.
On January 10, the petition for the issuance of a temporary environmental protection order against quarry operations began with Cebu City RTC Branch 23 Presiding Judge Generoso Labra hearing the case.
