Tarlac City, Tarlac – to continually upgrade local government units' efforts in mitigating the effects of disasters, DILG Tarlac organized a Provincial Convergence and Disaster Resilience Dialogue on January 30, 2019 at the Provincial Capitol.

The orientation is aimed at the members of the LISTO Team composed of local chief executives, local disaster risk reduction and management officers, chiefs of police, fire marshals, DILG officers, municipal planning and development coordinators and social welfare and development officers about the minimum preparedness actions they need to undertake before, during, and after disasters.

DILG Tarlac Provincial Director Belina Herman gave her testimony during the onslaught of Supertyphoon Yolanda (Haiyan) that ravaged most parts of the Visayas and left many casualties along its path.

"We do have no hold of natural calamities but we can mitigate their effects... our goal is to have zero casualty," she said.

She further explained the need to converge once again all members of the Listo team to identify the gaps and challenges during the early stages of the program's implementation and provide timely solutions to them.

LGOO II Maharlina Tejada provided glimpse of how Operation Listo came to be by tracing the timeline of the program's implementation which began in 2014. She explained that LISTO 3.0 is an upgrade specifically on the layout of the preparedness manual, inclusion of the preparedness checklist for governors, and the use of the Quality Assurance System (QAS) to ensure the reliability of the Barangay DRRM plans.

DRRM focal person Bryan Rivera also explained the details of the guide for governors which enumerates their responsibilities upon alert, before, during, and after disasters. He also enumerated the possible capacity development interventions the governors may consider during "peace time" or before calamities.

Cluster Leader Ener Cambronero facilitated the workshop for the LGU functionaries and DILG officers to outline the issues and challenges they came across with during the previous versions of the program.

He emphasized DILG's mandate to make sure that all the precautionary measures before disasters are observed by the LGUs by following the monitoring form DILG officers use and announced that the Department just created a post-disaster validation team to exact accountabilities from local chief executives who are not in their respective areas of responsibility during disasters.

Operation Listo is DILG's program to capacitate local government units on how to mitigate the adverse effects of natural and man-made hazards by providing them a checklist on the minimum preparedness actions they need to adopt before, during, and after calamities.