AN ACT of God. The fatalists saw Typhoon Ondoy delivering in just a day more than a full month’s worth of rain.
An act of God. The authorities in both national and local levels seconded, finding some convenient scapegoat for their abject failure to address, much less “coordinate” the disaster, as their so-called councils were created to do.
An act of God, it was, but not without much help from man.
So Typhoon Ondoy’s rains did indeed cause landslides, one hitting right home: San Juan Bano, Arayat, resulting to 14 deaths. But that landslide, as all the others, was long waiting, nay, wanting to happen.
Cutting trees – the high-priced teak for furniture, the lowly ipil for charcoal – has long created swathe of bald areas around Mount Arayat, as well as in the mountains and hills of Rizal. Devoid of habitation, of the holding, grappling roots of trees, the loosened soil with the heavy rainfall makes a ready brew for disaster. Any school child with rudimentary understanding of Ecology 101 readily knows that. But who cares?
Not the tree-cutters out for profit, no matter the cost. Not the settlers finding their only habitat on the hillsides and mountain ledges. Not the government authorities finding rich votes in their oh-so-dangerous enclaves. Live at your own risk: some billboard should have been posted there. Still, who would care to take heed?
Rampaging flood waters caused by Typhoon Ondoy swept countless houses along the waterways, whether rivers, creeks or esteros. So who’s to blame? God?
God did not mean man to live in waterways, else She would have given him fins for limbs and gills for lungs. Man chose to live, out of stupidity not necessity, right on the waterways, atop rickety contraptions no stronger than honeycombs.
Nature deemed water to seek its own course. Again, any idiot knows that. Yet, man builds right on that course, at the same time making it a dumpsite for everything, not least of which his trash. Damn man, when the heavy rains come.
After the typhoon, the cleaning. Of the debris it wrought. Early Sunday morning the wife and I were back to the old digs at St. Jude Village. The kids, the five-year-old grandson included, did a swell job cleaning the house all night till 3 a.m. after the foot-high floodwaters that hit the ground floor receded. It was my turn to dig the garden and the frontyard out of six inches of mud. A backbreaking job I finished by lunch.
Now it’s the cars’ turn to be taken to the carpet cleaners for a thorough interior scrub and drying. Good the floodwaters did not reach the engines, else it’s sayonara to the Toyota Avanza and the Honda Civic.
Very slight inconveniences these – floodwaters getting into the house and the cars, hosing and sweeping all the mud – really are. More fortunate are we than our fellow residents in the village whose houses and cars are still deep in floodwaters. Much, much luckier are we than those who lost their homes in the floods.
After the typhoon, the cleansing. The rivers have done their own cleaning, ridding themselves of the man-made obstructions in the most natural of ways – with a heavy dose of water.
An opportunity there that should not be lost to the authorities: let the rivers, and all waterways, be. Stop the establishment of squatter colonies along the banks, as well as on the riverbed itself.
In that regard, a monstrous disaster wanting to happen is in Angeles City itself. The Abacan River – its very bed – has been subdivided into colonies of informal settlers. You don’t believe me? Go stand at either Hesonville Bridge or the Abacan Bridge and behold the sight of hundreds of shanties.
It is not too long ago to forget the capability of the Abacan River for death and destruction. The rampaging lahar flows that obliterated whatever stood on the river and along its banks – from the Angeles City General Hospital, to the Del Rosario Compound, to the houses that lined its banks from upstream Anunas to downstream Pandan – are still fresh in the collective memory of the people of Angeles.
Typhoon Ondoy is a forewarning. What it wrought, the next typhoon can as easily cause. Is anyone listening?
An act of God. The authorities in both national and local levels seconded, finding some convenient scapegoat for their abject failure to address, much less “coordinate” the disaster, as their so-called councils were created to do.
An act of God, it was, but not without much help from man.
So Typhoon Ondoy’s rains did indeed cause landslides, one hitting right home: San Juan Bano, Arayat, resulting to 14 deaths. But that landslide, as all the others, was long waiting, nay, wanting to happen.
Cutting trees – the high-priced teak for furniture, the lowly ipil for charcoal – has long created swathe of bald areas around Mount Arayat, as well as in the mountains and hills of Rizal. Devoid of habitation, of the holding, grappling roots of trees, the loosened soil with the heavy rainfall makes a ready brew for disaster. Any school child with rudimentary understanding of Ecology 101 readily knows that. But who cares?
Not the tree-cutters out for profit, no matter the cost. Not the settlers finding their only habitat on the hillsides and mountain ledges. Not the government authorities finding rich votes in their oh-so-dangerous enclaves. Live at your own risk: some billboard should have been posted there. Still, who would care to take heed?
Rampaging flood waters caused by Typhoon Ondoy swept countless houses along the waterways, whether rivers, creeks or esteros. So who’s to blame? God?
God did not mean man to live in waterways, else She would have given him fins for limbs and gills for lungs. Man chose to live, out of stupidity not necessity, right on the waterways, atop rickety contraptions no stronger than honeycombs.
Nature deemed water to seek its own course. Again, any idiot knows that. Yet, man builds right on that course, at the same time making it a dumpsite for everything, not least of which his trash. Damn man, when the heavy rains come.
After the typhoon, the cleaning. Of the debris it wrought. Early Sunday morning the wife and I were back to the old digs at St. Jude Village. The kids, the five-year-old grandson included, did a swell job cleaning the house all night till 3 a.m. after the foot-high floodwaters that hit the ground floor receded. It was my turn to dig the garden and the frontyard out of six inches of mud. A backbreaking job I finished by lunch.
Now it’s the cars’ turn to be taken to the carpet cleaners for a thorough interior scrub and drying. Good the floodwaters did not reach the engines, else it’s sayonara to the Toyota Avanza and the Honda Civic.
Very slight inconveniences these – floodwaters getting into the house and the cars, hosing and sweeping all the mud – really are. More fortunate are we than our fellow residents in the village whose houses and cars are still deep in floodwaters. Much, much luckier are we than those who lost their homes in the floods.
After the typhoon, the cleansing. The rivers have done their own cleaning, ridding themselves of the man-made obstructions in the most natural of ways – with a heavy dose of water.
An opportunity there that should not be lost to the authorities: let the rivers, and all waterways, be. Stop the establishment of squatter colonies along the banks, as well as on the riverbed itself.
In that regard, a monstrous disaster wanting to happen is in Angeles City itself. The Abacan River – its very bed – has been subdivided into colonies of informal settlers. You don’t believe me? Go stand at either Hesonville Bridge or the Abacan Bridge and behold the sight of hundreds of shanties.
It is not too long ago to forget the capability of the Abacan River for death and destruction. The rampaging lahar flows that obliterated whatever stood on the river and along its banks – from the Angeles City General Hospital, to the Del Rosario Compound, to the houses that lined its banks from upstream Anunas to downstream Pandan – are still fresh in the collective memory of the people of Angeles.
Typhoon Ondoy is a forewarning. What it wrought, the next typhoon can as easily cause. Is anyone listening?
