Cave rescue highlights

Unified Com Cen need

TAGBILARAN CITY, Bohol, July 12 (PIA) – Still reeling from a cave rescue that exposed the state of preparedness Bohol disaster rescue groups have when faced with difficult situations, the head of the provincial disaster risk reduction management office (PDRRMO) bared the activation of a Unified Command Center (UCC) that could help thresh out delays in rescue efforts due to lack of inter-agency coordination.

PDRRMO Officer Dr. Anthony Damalerio said an executive Order, signed by Governor Erico Aristotle Aumentado in 2023 has established the UCC: a centralized multi-agency facility that allows a much better coordination efforts in response to crisis situations to ensure effectiveness and efficiency in disaster prevention and response.

It may be recalled that a few weeks ago, in Antequera, some teens went swimming in a cave pool and three of them decided to explore an underwater cave, which caused the three of them to get trapped in a dark cave cavity, for three to eight hours.

In the absence of an operational protocol for the local disaster workers, they sent out information to the PDRRMO but succeeding information from the source could not be obtained anymore, as the local Incident Command System went mobile and set up in the vicinity of the rescue area, where mobile signal was not available.

Calls for rescue help allegedly came to the PDRRM, the Bureau of Fire Protection, Philippine Coast Guard and other private rescue groups, but these were not clearly coordinated, that rescuers lost the critical advantage of time.

The result, agencies went to the site on their own, instead of using the UCC as the base so that rescue groups could bring the best equipment and the most experienced trained rescue personnel.

The UCC, housed at the PDRRM Operations Center in Dao District would be manned by the Philippine Coast Guard, Bureau of Fire Protection, Philippine National Police and the Philippine Army’s 47 Infantry Battalion, for a faster response, by making sure coordination is there the moment an emergency pops up.

The UCC, which operates under the Office of the Governor operates in the PDRRMO, but shall leverage state of the art technologies to enhance its capabilities in crisis management, communication, information sharing and decision making, according to Governor Aumentado.

Composing the UCC is a management and operations group made up of the PDRRMO, Bohol provincial Police Office, Philippine Coast Guard, Armed Forces of the Philippines, Bureau of Fire Protection, Department of Health and the Department of Social Welfare and Development, upon which from these, an incident commander would be picked based on experience, expertise, authority and crisis management.

The apparent failure of the operationalization of the UCC at that time, may have allowed the rescue of the three teens trapped inside the cave pool, but it has also caused the life of a civilian who want in to devise his own rescue. (PIABohol)

UNIFIED COMMAND CEN. The latest rescue incident in Antequera may have been successful despite a loss of life of an untrained civilian rescuer, but may have shown the critical role of the established Unified Command Center (UCC) which has been established under Gov Aris Aumentado’s Executive Order No 56, s. 2023. The UCC was also a topic during the Kapihan on Disaster Resilience with PDRRM O Anthony Damalerio and Ryan Palma. (PIABOhol)