After the deluge, I attempted to find out about friends by asking them how many animals they had in their ark. Only Gilda Cordero-Fernando had the sense of humor to reply. ?Just me, my tapeworm, and my husband,? she said.

Everyone knows that the word ?Tagalog,? described people who lived near the river (taga-ilog) and that the people of Pampanga?the Kapampangans?were people who lived near the banks of a river (pampang). Living in an archipelago resulted in many references to water and bodies of water in our languages, but our big problem is that so many of us have grown so used to land, roads and bridges that we have forgotten how to live and survive in water.

In pre-colonial times, people lived in or near the water. They were so different from us who describe the Philippines as a group of islands separated by water. In pre-Spanish times, our ancestors did not need the wheel, roads and bridges because then the islands were connected by water. In some places newborn infants were thrown into the sea or into the river so that they would recognize the taste of water from childhood. Everyone could swim and if people drowned at all, it was not because they didn?t know how to swim.

I was abroad at the height of the rain and floods and only saw the images on the TV news through the Internet. I wondered why the early reports were so hysterical, adding to the panic rather than advising people to calm down and seek higher ground. Now that we are dry, the media are starting to blame people for the lack or inadequate rescue operations. But what can we do in the midst of a disaster? One wonders whether the high-pitched reporting helped make a bad situation better or worse.

In the news, I keep hearing about this being one of the worst floods in 40 years without any attribution to the source of that information? From my own childhood, I recall the wrath and destruction of Typhoon ?Yoling,? and another time when it rained for 40 days and 40 nights as it did in the Bible. Nobody had the good sense to build an ark and this non-stop rain was attributed to the theft of the image of the Sto. Niño de Tondo. The image was recovered and returned in a solemn procession to Tondo church by Imelda Marcos herself and, if we are to believe the story, the rain stopped. The image has not been stolen since.

If you consult the index of the 55-volume compilation of historical documents edited by Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson at the turn of the last century, you will find more than half a page of references to ?meteorology and meteorological phenomena.? Naturally there is mention of weather as observed by the Spanish Jesuits who set up the world famous Manila Observatory in the Walled City in 1865 just to compile and analyze typhoon and earthquake data. Their work was recognized and respected in the region, although the Jesuits started with such crude instruments as a thermometer and a stick with a piece of string attached to show the direction and intensity of wind. Typhoon and weather forecasts from the Manila Observatory were relied upon in the region and the rest of the world even thought they did not have sophisticated equipment and computers as we do today.

Fr. Federico Faura, after whom Padre Faura Street in Ermita is named, was the first director of the Manila Observatory, which moved from Intramuros to Ermita and became the official Weather Bureau in 1901. The present Manila Observatory transferred to Loyola Heights, Quezon City, in 1962 and continues its research work, leaving the weather forecasting to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) which was established in 1972.

The Blair and Robertson index has historical references to: rain and floods; thunder and lightning; water spouts; rainbows; snow and ice; drought; storms (baguios, vagios, gales, hurricanes, samatras, tempests, tornadoes, typhoons, tifones, tufones, whirlwinds). Related to all these were references to shipwrecks. So there is a lot of history on storms and floods waiting to be written not just from Blair and Robertson but from the data compiled by the Jesuit Manila Observatory.

Padre Faura, his assistants, and his successors have compiled data not only from weather and earthquakes they experienced but also from historical sources like the above that give us a weather picture of the Philippines through time.

Another source for weather researchers is John Foreman who wrote in 1905:

?Commencing July 11, 1904, three days of incessant rain in Rizal Province produced the greatest inundation of Manila suburbs within living memory. Human lives were lost; many cattle were washed away; barges in the river were wrenched from their moorings and dashed against the bridge piers; pirogues were used instead of vehicles in the thoroughfares; considerable damage was done in the shops and many persons had to wade through flooded streets knee-deep in water.?

Now that the wrath of Ondoy is part of our weather history, maybe we should ask ourselves what we will do with these stories. Do we just file them somewhere, or try to find a pattern that can help us understand or avoid similar tragedies in the future?
Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu