Partners, volunteers

At the heart of the massive six-day search-and-rescue operation for Interior Secretary Jesse Robredo and his companions was the active participation of private citizens. It was a vital detail Robredo himself, the Magsaysay awardee and pioneer of people empowerment in local governance, would have heartily approved.

The national government set up the operational framework with impressive dispatch, called on Navy divers and deployed dozens of seacraft and as many as eight helicopters to the effort, even conducted thorough and professional press briefings—but it was the intrepid work of volunteer technical (i.e., nonrecreational) divers, in cooperation with Navy divers, that allowed the operation to locate the plane and recover the remains of Robredo and pilot Jessup Bahinting.

To the Briton Matt Reed, the Filipino Anna Cu Unjieng and the American Shelagh Cooley, to Navy men Roger Brizuela and Edgar Vergara, as well as to the other volunteer divers who risked their lives to locate Robredo’s plane, an entire country is grateful.

We wish to be clear: The divers could not have done what they did without the help of everyone else. It was a police official, for instance, who located the three technical divers at their dive resort on Malapascua, in northern Cebu. It was the special sonar equipment flown in to the site of the operation that defined the area where the divers ought to be sent. And so on.

Thus, what we saw take place in the now-dolorous waters off Masbate was a real coming together of the public sector and the private, a genuine collaboration where one party’s lack was filled up by another party’s expertise, and so on down both the chain of command and the volunteer chain.

Even the rescue of Robredo’s aide, Senior Insp. Jun Abrazado, moments after the ill-fated plane crashed into the sea last Saturday, Aug. 18, foreshadowed the public-private narrative. Local officials were immediately informed that witnesses had seen a small plane plunge into the waters about half a kilometer away from the airport, but it was a fisherman who plucked an injured and disoriented Abrazado out of the sea.

There may be a lesson in here somewhere.

In many cities, volunteer (i.e., nongovernment) firefighting units have established a solid reputation. In both the “Ondoy” floods of 2009 and the habagat floods of 2012, various private-sector rescue groups went into action. In some residential areas in different parts of the country, neighbors pitch in for crime-watch duty.

While it would be ideal to institute a national, government-run emergency alert system like 911 in Canada or the United States (our own 117 is a long way from approximating that kind of scope or speed of responsiveness), the resources required would be forbidding. Perhaps we can set up an intermediate system, or boost 117, by integrating various private-sector initiatives into it.

The irony is that we are, notoriously, a safety-last nation. How many of the innumerable tragedies that have darkened our front pages and TV screens over the years could have been avoided, if only ships had carried enough life-vests, if only passengers had worn their seatbelts, if only traffic lights had been heeded, if only aircraft safety rules had not been ignored, if only the right security measures had been in place?

Very many Filipinos lack a thorough grounding in safety awareness, but many Filipinos excel in volunteer rescue work. (Just ask the Philippine National Red Cross.) If, in the wake of the untimely, unbearably sad death of Robredo and two of his companions (the body of Nepalese student pilot Kshitiz Chand was found last—by a fisherman), a concerted effort to encourage volunteer rescue groups throughout the country and integrate them into a government-coordinated system is launched and then sustained, we might actually not only save more lives but create a safety-first counter-culture.

Come to think of it, there may be no real need for the national government to get things started. Let the volunteers themselves, wherever they live, decide—and then trust, Robredo-like, that local governments will follow where the people lead.