Mayor orders intensive week-long market clean-up drive

The city government will conduct an intensive seven-day clean-up drive starting Monday, March 13, at the areas of the city market, specifically blocks 3 and 4, that were razed to the ground by a fire that occurred in the evening of Saturday, March 11.      

He said the clean-up will be done only in places certified by the Bureau of Fire as ‘safe zones’ with contingents from the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Philippine Navy, and Philippine National Police providing security for the volunteers who will do the clean-up.       

The Mayor said that simultaneous with the clean-up activity is the immediate putting-up of stalls.      

“I have given out a tall order on Sunday that we need to restore market operations in seven days. It is an ambitious project and undertaking but we have to push ourselves to the limit so we can bring back the livelihood of vendors who were affected by the fire,” he stressed.      

The Mayor disclosed that more than one fourth of the entire public market area was damaged by the conflagration that lasted for more than an hour adding that around 1,700 of the 3,900 market vendors were affected.    

“We have to immediately bring back normalcy in the public market’s operations,” he said. – Gaby B. Keith