DAVAO CITY (PIA) -- Disaster resilience must be anchored in the family, according to Office of Civil Defense (OCD) XI director Ednar Dayanghirang.

There are about five million people in the Davao Region, so it is necessary to discuss family resilience to disasters.

According to Dayanghirang, every family must talk about disaster by identifying the hazards that threaten the family during calamities, knowing where to go in case of evacuation, and knowing the numbers to call.

“It was the only way to make the family resilient. Let us be prepared on our own,” he said.

He added that there are strategies he puts up in working in the government system where he deals with the national office, 44 government agencies, 54 local government units, and a thousand barangays on the regional level involved in the disaster-resiliency agenda.

He has also adopted a lateral collaboration with the Army reservists where every province will be trained and organized to help in the disaster response, and the National Commission on the Indigenous Peoples in Davao Region will also be trained and organized in their ancestral domains to act on their own.

Dayanghirang has coordinated with the Regional Director of the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos so that, on the Jamaah level, Muslim brothers and sisters would be trained and organized to handle disasters.