Mitigating disasters

It was a case of too much rain too soon. In just 15 hours, some 411 millimeters of rain fell, exceeding the September average of 391 millimeters, and beating the weather bureau’s one-day record of 331 millimeters set in 1967 (Manila Standard Today, Sept. 28).

And, strictly speaking, typhoon Ondoy was not even a typhoon. It was only a tropical storm with winds of only 85 kph when it made landfall on the eastern coast of Luzon. But what it did in its counter-clockwise spin was to suck monsoon rains from the southwest, i.e. the Indian Ocean, which it dumped with reckless abandon on Metro Manila and some 25 neighboring provinces.

Was this climate change wrecking havoc on Planet Earth? Barely two weeks ago, Taiwan and then mainland China were also deluged by a similar weather system, with even stronger winds.

But media have pointed out that back in 1972 (typhoon Yoling) and in 1967 (typhoon What’s-her-name) also caused massive death and destruction from flooding and devastating winds, long before anyone invented the term “climate change.”

(Rachel Carson, in her 1960s book The Silent Spring warned about water and air pollution, but not directly about climate change.)

And I recall that in May of 1959 or 1960, when I was a student in Northwestern, Metro Manila was inundated by massive floods that lapped up to the floor of my room in Horseshoe Drive in Quezon City. In my lifetime, that landmark has never been equaled, not in 1967, or in 1972, or in 2009.

But the disaster of 2009, inflicted on Metro Manila and adjoining provinces with an urban population and automobile density more than double that in 1967 or 1972, has set a record of sorts, recorded for posterity in many still photos and video clips uploaded in Facebook.

Could any government have prevented the disaster that overtook the metro and adjoining provinces over the weekend? I doubt it.

Sir Nicholas Stern, author of The Stern Report commissioned by the British Ministry of Finance about three years ago, concludes that even if the world were to suddenly and magically stop spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere today (or three years ago), the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere would continue global warming for the next 30 years.

So, assuming that greenhouse gases are indeed responsible for global warming and the resultant aberrations in the world’s climate, there is nothing that any government can do in the foreseeable future to correct things. More devastating storms, more frequent droughts and desertification, more extremes in temperature, more melting of polar ice, more flooding of coastal areas. Welcome to Planet Earth in the 21st century.

(It may or may not have any connection to global warming, but an international airline pilot—friend of my son Hochi—recently told him that the frequency and intensity of air turbulence along his routes is more severe now than it has ever been in his 14 years as an international commercial pilot.)

The only thing that governments can do in times of unpredictable and unavoidable disasters would be to mitigate their effects on the population, by anticipating them and conceptualizing solutions. In this respect, the Arroyo administration has been remiss and clueless.

One of the most deplorable effects of the Ondoy Disaster has been the forced evacuation of thousands of residents to the roofs of their homes, as floodwaters rose to their second floors. Many had to spend up to 15 hours in this condition, without food, without drinking water, without adequate clothes on their backs, in the driving rain. At least one woman is reported to have died of hypothermia.

Neither the national government nor the local governments nor the Philippine military has amphibious vehicles or rescue rafts to save these thousands, stranded on their rooftops. Desperate cell phone calls to dzMM TeleRadyo and ANC Channel 21, pleading for rescue, went tragically unheeded because no one had amphibious vehicles that could traverse the flooded streets which even big trucks and buses could not navigate through.–Antonio C. Abaya, Manila Standard Today