"The P11.2 billion Jalaur River dam will be built on the West Panay Fault, in Calinog town identified by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau RO6 (MGB-RO6) to have contributed to Iloilo province's high landslide susceptibility rating," said Cris Chavez of the farmers' organization Pamanggas. This was his response to Senator Franklin Drilon's statement that the communities' fears are baseless and are based on erroneous beliefs.

According to the MGB, areas with high to very high landslide susceptibility rating are those that have active and/or recent landslide, with numerous and large tension cracks, are headwaters, those with steep slopes, with numerous old landslides and those near faults.

"If you look at the geo-hazard maps from the MGB and the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs), and overlay that with the location map of the Jalaur River dam project, it becomes clear that our fears are not baseless nor erroneous," Chavez added.

Panay Island also lies along the fringes of the Negros Trench which has been described as a collision zone by the Phivolcs. Trenches are long, narrow, and deep depression in the ocean floor which typically runs parallel to a plate boundary and marks a subduction zone or an area where the plate of the earth's crust moves sideways and downwards into the mantle beneath another plate.

"What grates is the senator's cavalier attitude towards our concerns, instead of looking into them seriously and studiously. Bayan Muna's Representative Neri Colmenares have the right of it to seek a scrupulous review of the feasibility study on the project that was conducted by the National Irrigation Administration," Chavez said, adding that "Nowhere was it mentioned in the Executive Summary of the Feasibility Study done in 2009 by NIA Consult of the potential hazards the major faulting and folding processes within and along Panay island pose."

"The P8.95 billion funding for the Jalaur River Multipurpose Project is an official development assistance in the form of loan from the Korean Economic Development Cooperation Fund. So basically, South Korean taxpayer's money will be used to build a multi-billion pesos dam on what is assuredly an earthquake-prone site, to be paid for by Filipino taxpayer's money with much of its touted benefits remains questionable," Chavez further said.*