Back in February, President Gloria Arroyo ordered the environment and natural resources department to complete a 90 million-peso (1.76 million-dollar) geohazard mapping program covering at least half the towns in the Philippines within three years.

The move followed the collapse of a mountain side that buried more than a thousand people on the central Philippine island of Leyte that month.

Located on what is known as the Philippine fault, the island is the juncture of two earth plates -- one pushing the island northwest toward China and the eastern section slipping the other way toward Indonesia -- making Leyte one of the most dangerous places to live in the Philippines.

The project would identify potential threats from landslides and earthquakes, floods, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, liquefaction and other natural hazards that according to official data kill about 500 Filipinos every year.

"We cannot prevent the event itself, it's a natural thing. But the impact can somehow be lessened by making sure that people are aware, and hopefully they are more vigilant," said Antonio Apostol, head of the geological survey division of the government's Mines and Geosciences Bureau that is in charge of the project.

The seismology office says an average of five earthquakes, caused mostly by the tectonic plate movements, rocks the Philippines every single day, though most are barely perceptible.

Some quakes are caused by the country's 22 active volcanoes. The last major eruption, Pinatubo northwest of Manila in 1991, altered the global climate for years afterwards as millions of tons of sulfur dioxide shot into the stratosphere blocked sunlight and cooled the entire Earth by up to 0.6 degrees Celsius.

"We're still lucky that we are not being hit in places where it would really hurt," said Apostol, who noted that many of the Philippines' major population centers are built among major rivers and are prone to flooding.

"Imagine this (a major natural disaster) happening in populated areas. The impact on the people would be massive," he told AFP in an interview.

Arroyo has warned that the danger from natural calamities will be magnified this year due to the La Nina phenomenon.

Under La Nina, the sea-surface temperature in the central and eastern tropical Pacific falls below normal, typically bringing above-average rainfall to the Philippines as well as Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The government weather office says this could increase the number of storms and typhoons that strike the northern two-thirds of the country every year, which average about 19. It said the entire eastern seaboard would be at risk.

The Leyte landslide "is likely not the last that will happen during the year, considering the La Nina period. So we need to educate the people on the warning systems," said weather bureau chief Graciano Yumul.

"In areas that have been affected by landslides, the likelihood of recurrence is great," Apostol added.

The risk compounded pre-existing dangers across the Philippines, he said.

"There are very few areas in the country that can really be called ideal -- where there would be no type of geohazard occurring. I would say just 10 percent," he said.

"In the Philippine fault, some sections are moving at around 2.5 centimeters (one inch) a year. That's very fast compared to other areas, where the movement would be measured in the order of millimeters over several hundred years."

A four-member field survey team documenting anecdotal histories of past disasters takes at least two months to translate the data into a 50,000:1 scale map for a single 48,000-hectare (118,560-acre) quadrant, the average size of a Philippine town.

The government has to make 900 such maps to cover the entire country, after which all the danger zones would have to be scaled down to 10,000:1 maps to identify possible relocation sites at village level, Apostol said.

Japan, which is in a similar geological predicament, donated four million pesos- (78,277-dollars-) worth of geohazard mapping equipment to Manila earlier this month.

The project was launched way back in 1999, in the immediate aftermath of a sudden landslip that devastated a low-cost development of 379 hilltop row houses in an eastern Manila suburb called Cherry Hills that killed 32 people and left dozens others injured.

A government report faulted "error in judgment" by the developers, who were subsequently sued by the survivors.

Apostol said ordinary people themselves often noticed physical signs that, given proper education, would give them advance warning that disaster is about to strike.

"They see fences and posts being tilted, trees are starting to tilt," he said. "These are indications that the ground is unstable. But sometimes people notice these but they could not relate it to anything that they know, especially if they are not familiar with landslides."

Nature is not always to blame.

In some areas, like the central island of Mindoro, "rivers have been changing course over time" not only because of natural causes, but human activity, said Apostol. "They build a dike to prevent (floods), but once you put up a dike it just causes the water to go the other way."

But planned "engineering interventions" are sometimes more feasible to protect people than mass relocation of entire communities, Apostol said, citing the case of Manila, a metropolis of more than 10 million where large areas around the mouth of the Pasig river are built on top of sand and mud.

But these remedies were expensive, he added, and ignored by developers who "try to minimize" costs to squeeze out more profits.

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