Quake destroys Chocolate Hills viewing deck, causes landslides

Although the epicenter of Tuesday's deadly earthquake in Central Visayas was in Carmen town in Bohol province, no fatality was reported there. The magnitude-7.2 tremor, however, caused damage to Carmen's most famous tourist spot: the iconic Chocolate Hills.

In a report on GMA News TV's “News To Go” on Wednesday, lawyer Eleazar Cagol, Carmen's municipal administrator, said the viewing deck at the Chocolate Hills sustained serious damage from the quake, which also caused landslides on some of the hills.

Cagol said guests will need to be entertained in an alternate place around the area while the deck is being repaired.

“Yung complex mismo na view deck, it's not worthy for business operations. May mga hills na kasama dun sa mavu-view natin na nag-landslide,” said Cagol.

The television report said while the town of Carmen was the epicenter of the earthquake, the Local Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council has yet to find any casualties there, which Cagol considers to be miraculous.

Latest reports from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) pegged the number of fatalities as of Wednesday at 107. The quake also destroyed several heritage churches in Bohol, some of them more than 300 years old.

When asked if the churches in the municipality have also sustained damage, Cagol said one of their churches had collapsed.

President Benigno Aquino III, who visited the affected areas on Wednesday, said that while the government could not commit resources yet for the rehabilitation of the churches, he will definitely seek to "at least get them back physically to where they were."

Aquino's cousin in the Senate, Sen. Bam Aquino, said the Congress should allocate P15 billion from calamity funds in the proposed 2014 national budget for the rehabilitation efforts in quake-hit areas in Central Visayas.

Sen. Aquino said he will propose an amendment to the 2014 spending plan that will create the P15-billion rehabilitation fund once the proposed national budget is tackled on the Senate floor in the coming weeks.

He said bulk of his proposed fund should be used to rehabilitate heritage churches and other tourism sites in Bohol province that were heavily damaged by the quake. — Rie Takumi/KBK, GMA News