18 August 2026
About 1,132 families left the Mayon evacuation camps from 6 August 2026 after roughly seven months. The newest official figures on what the crisis cost are dated 5 June.
The evacuation camps around Mayon emptied on 6 August 2026. Roughly 1,132 families, more than four thousand people, walked out of school gyms and covered courts they had been living in since January and went back to their own houses. Not to transitional shelters, not to a resettlement site. Home.
That’s the story, and it’s a good one. What follows is the part nobody publishes: the official record of what this crisis cost and what was spent on it stops dead on 5 June 2026, ten weeks before those families packed up. We went looking for the numbers behind the homecoming and found a gap where they should be.
Mayon was lowered from Alert Level 3 to Alert Level 2 on 5 August 2026 at 3pm. The stated basis was a general decline in unrest since 23 July, with the last Strombolian event on 26 July and the last pyroclastic density current on 28 July.
The six kilometre permanent danger zone stays closed. That isn’t a formality. It is the condition attached to every family that went home, and it is the line that separates a house you can sleep in from a house you cannot.
Alert Level 2 doesn’t mean the eruption is over. The magmatic eruption began on 6 January 2026, and at its July peak the volcano was releasing 13,128 tonnes of sulphur dioxide a day, described in the monitoring record as the highest in twenty-six years. Level 2 means moderate unrest. It means the volcano’s still awake.
One thing worth knowing if you go looking yourself: DOST’s own HazardHunter portal was still showing Alert Level 3 when we read it on 18 August 2026, thirteen days after the downgrade. Two government systems, two different alert levels, and a resident checking the wrong one gets the wrong answer. We are recording that rather than quietly using the figure we prefer.
Returns began 6 August 2026, the day after the downgrade, on an order to clear the camps. About 1,132 families and more than 4,000 individuals left. Each family got one sack of rice from the province. The national social welfare department handed out food packs rated for fifteen days on 7 August.
The five local governments taking returnees were Malilipot, Camalig, Guinobatan, Ligao City and Tabaco City.
They had been displaced for about seven months. We say “about” deliberately: one national paper reports seven months, another outlet’s headline says four. Seven fits the 6 January start date, so that is the figure we lean on, and we are telling you the other one exists.
We could not find a barangay-level list of who returned where. LGU level is as fine as the public record gets on this.
On 6 May 2026 the Albay Sangguniang Panlalawigan passed Resolution No. 0579-2026 in its 40th regular session, placing eight local governments under a state of calamity:
A declaration releases the 30 percent quick response portion of each LGU’s calamity fund, and lets each one draw on its own local disaster fund. So this list is a spending authority, not a label.
Two honest caveats. First, we are relying on press reporting of the resolution rather than the resolution itself, because we couldn’t reach the provincial government’s own document repository. Second, and this matters more: we found nothing confirming the declaration is still in force on 18 August 2026. No amending resolution, no lifting, no extension. The eight-LGU list is accurate for May. For August it’s simply unverified.
Worth noting who is not on it. Malinao sits in the same congressional district as Tabaco and shares Mount Malinao with Tiwi, and it was not declared. Malinao is north of Mayon, beyond Tabaco. That absence is the sourced fact. Whether any Malinao barangay sits inside a Mayon danger zone is something we could not establish, so we’re not claiming it either way.
The most recent disaster response report we could read directly is dated 5 June 2026. As of that evening:
Three weeks earlier, on 18 May, the same running total stood at ₱222,604,826.51. So roughly ₱59 million moved in eighteen days at the height of it.
Then the reports stop. Report 83 is the last one indexed. Everything above is ten weeks old, and it describes the crisis rather than the homecoming. Do not read ₱281.8 million as a final figure. It’s a snapshot of a running total, taken while people were still in the gyms.
This site prints disagreements instead of picking the tidier number, so here they are.
Agricultural damage: ₱6.6 million or ₱13 million. The provincial agriculture office reported ₱6,694,229.43 as of 5 May 2026, broken into ₱2,638,563.42 of palay affecting 87 farmers and ₱4,055,666.01 in high value crops, across Camalig, Guinobatan and Daraga. Three outlets carried that figure. Four days later a fourth reported ₱13 million in crop losses. Crop validation was still running, so the larger number is probably a later assessment rather than a contradiction, but we could not confirm the agency or the as-of date. Both stand.
Affected population: 30,522 families or 71,552. These count different things and get conflated constantly. The 30,522 families and 102,406 individuals figure, attributed to civil defence in the region on 4 May, counts the ashfall episode across 87 barangays, 52 of them with thick ashfall. The 71,552 figure is the cumulative count for the entire eruption as of 5 June. Anyone quoting one as the other is wrong by a factor of two.
One small oddity, and it is in the source document rather than in our reading of it: the June report lists thirteen LGU names while stating that twelve were affected.
Here is where we can add something. Three of the eight LGUs under that calamity declaration are cities we have already mapped against the national infrastructure dataset. Between them, Legazpi, Ligao and Tabaco hold 1,168 DPWH project records worth about ₱43.88 billion, read on 18 August 2026.
Legazpi alone accounts for 782 of those, worth ₱28.27 billion, with 294 still ongoing. Tabaco has 202 records worth ₱9.01 billion and only 13 ongoing, which is a very different profile from Legazpi’s. Ligao sits at 184 records worth ₱6.60 billion.
That’s the context a relief figure never carries. ₱281 million in emergency assistance across the province, against ₱43.88 billion of national infrastructure money in three of the affected cities. Both numbers are real, they answer different questions, and only one of them gets reported when a volcano erupts. Flood control, drainage and road work in these towns is the thing that decides how the next ashfall drains away, and it’s tracked in a dataset nobody cross-references against a disaster.
You can see the per-city breakdown on each LGU page, and the whole regional cut on public money in Bicol.
We audited every provincial and city government website in Bicol on 17 August 2026 against the twelve mandated disclosures, scored on whether a resident can actually find them.
[bb_chart name=”transparency-scorecard” caption=”Scored on findability, not legal compliance. A budget that exists but is not linked from the homepage scores zero, because a resident who cannot find it might as well be told it does not exist.”]
The relevance to a calamity declaration is direct. A state of calamity releases a quick response fund, and how that fund gets spent is exactly the kind of thing the Full Disclosure Policy exists to make public. Whether the eight declared LGUs post those disbursements is a question their own websites should answer. Mostly they don’t. The full scorecard is here.
Listing the gaps is part of the record, not an apology for it.
If you hold any of these documents, a provincial resolution, a later response report, a damage assessment, send them and they go up with attribution. That’s the most useful thing anyone can do with this page. Corrections and takedowns are here.
Mayon dropped to Alert Level 2 on 5 August 2026. About 1,132 families went home from 6 August after roughly seven months in camps, back to their own houses, with the six kilometre danger zone still closed. Eight Albay LGUs were placed under a state of calamity in May and we can’t confirm whether that’s still in force. ₱281.86 million in assistance had been released as of 5 June, which is the newest official figure available and is now ten weeks old. Agricultural damage is either ₱6.6 million or ₱13 million depending on which assessment you read.
Every figure here carries the date it was read, because a number without a date is a number nobody can check. Where our data comes from.
Source DSWD DROMIC Report No. 83 and PHIVOLCS bulletin, 5 August 2026. Written from the original report.
Published 18 August 2026. Every figure on this site carries its source and the date it was read. Where our data comes from. Something wrong here?