One of the many lessons from last week?s Inquirer forum on ?Ondoy? and ?Pepeng? can be summed up simply enough: The country?s rather small scientific community wants to know who the two congressmen responsible for delaying the purchase of the Doppler radar systems for Pagasa are.

Or, rather, many scientists already have an idea who these quarreling congressmen are; they merely want confirmation that the politics of self-interest prevented the national weather bureau from acquiring the new systems that could have accurately predicted the record rainfall Ondoy brought in its murderous wake.

Their concern is certainly a lead that enterprising journalists can follow?at the very least, to establish the truth about the long delay in the purchase of the state-of-the-art equipment that would have replaced Pagasa?s decades-old systems.

Other lessons from the forum??The Perfect Flood: What Really Happened, and How,? featured a meteorologist, two geologists, a typhoon specialist and a disaster response expert?include the following:

? Even without the Doppler radar systems, Pagasa could have warned the public, or at least concerned government agencies and perhaps the Philippine National Red Cross, about unusually heavy rainfall. A TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) satellite image taken about five hours before Ondoy struck Metro Manila and surrounding provinces showed that the rain rate, measured by inches per hour, was quite literally off the charts. Even if we factor in the time this particular image was made available online, Pagasa would still have had at least two hours? lead time to sound a warning.

? Despite a belated attempt to update its website, Pagasa still does not seem fully engaged in the age of the Internet; some of its officials had previously belittled the predictive value of material available online?as though such top-of-the-line institutions as the Pearl Harbor-based Joint Typhoon Warning Center of the US Navy or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (which conducts the TRMM in collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) could not be trusted.

? The post-Ondoy survey conducted by the UP National Institute of Geological Studies, key findings of which had already been reported in the media, found that the time lag between ?peak rainfall? and ?peak flood? was anywhere between two and nine hours. If the government had invested in a simple rain gauge system before Ondoy, the nine-hour time lag could have resulted in the timely evacuation of many thousands; a two-hour time lag could have resulted in the pre-positioning of rescue boats and lifelines.

? Such a rain gauge system can be built for less money than a congressman?s annual pork barrel allocation; one estimate is that a network of 100 ?stations,? each station costing about P48,000, will be sufficient to provide Pagasa, concerned government agencies or even private-sector corporations dependent on weather conditions with hard-and-fast estimates of the amount of rainfall.

? While the worst floods in at least four decades shook the capital and surrounding provinces, it is crucial to emphasize that, in the wake of Ondoy and Pepeng, more people died from landslides than from floods. This means, among other things, that hazard maps must be updated and made widely available?and that they must also clearly show those areas safe from landslides.

A second forum, later this week, will focus on the challenge of reconstruction. But the first established the baselines of a tragedy greater than either Pepeng or Ondoy: We have ignored the life-saving possibilities of applied science for far too long.