The Office of Civil Defense (OCD) has urged schools in Eastern Visayas to establish their disaster response protocols, stressing the importance of instilling disaster awareness among students.

OCD Eastern Visayas regional director Lord Byron Torrecarion said the practice is very crucial since the region is prone to multiple hazards.

“It is important to integrate disaster management. In Japan, they teach this as early as elementary school. It would be good to inculcate it in our education system, not just as theory but as practice,” Torrecarion told the Philippine News Agency on Monday.

Torrecarion said teaching disaster response also nurtures their spirit of volunteerism and love of country.

“By encouraging them to participate in disaster response, which is crucial and important because, for the past three years, the Philippines has ranked number one in the global risk index,” he said.

Torrecarion also encouraged students to help cascade the knowledge on disaster response to their family members and raise public awareness of what to do during a calamity or disaster.

“If we have integrated it into our education system, it will give us trained or partially trained volunteers if you have a student-level grassroots program,” he added.

The OCD offers to extend technical assistance to schools in crafting their disaster response protocols.

Torrecarion urged schools to follow the Visayas State University (VSU) in Baybay City, where more than 500 students staying at the Upper Dormitories were evacuated to safer grounds on Aug. 26, 2025, after heavy flooding affected parts of the campus.

The evacuation was carried out, following the school’s disaster resilience and management office (DRMO) protocol to ensure student safety after the city was affected by a heavy downpour of rain, affecting not only the school campus but also its neighboring Patag village.

Engineer Andy Phil Cortes, VSU DRMO director, said the evacuation is automatically enforced if the campus records six hours of continuous rainfall or three hours of heavy downpour.

Students are notified through official group chats to move to designated evacuation sites. They are also advised to bring their essential documents and “Go Bag.”

VSU’s disaster protocols were developed by the university’s Disaster Management Committee, in coordination with experts in geotechnical engineering and meteorology.

To strengthen preparedness, the VSU president is said to be planning to institutionalize disaster management education across all courses and in its laboratory school, according to Cortes. (PNA)