Viewpoint
Three in a row
By Juan L. MercadoTropical depression “Crising” jabbed Mindanao’s underbelly before it barreled out to sea on Thursday. May we now watch 33 candidates for 12 Senate seats sashay on stage?
Tropical depression “Crising” jabbed Mindanao’s underbelly before it barreled out to sea on Thursday. May we now watch 33 candidates for 12 Senate seats sashay on stage?
On December 4, 2012, Typhoon “Pablo” (international name “Bopha”) made landfall in Mindanao. Classified as a Category 5 typhoon by US meteorological experts, Pablo packed winds with an average speed of 185 kilometers per hour (kph) and gusts reaching 210 kph. Pablo’s eye crossed Mindanao through Davao Oriental, Compostela Valley, Agusan del Sur, Bukidnon and Misamis Oriental.
Debris flows are a type of landslide that involves rapid, downward mass movement of sediments coarser than sand, often including boulders one meter or more in diameter.
This refers to Ramon Tulfo’s Dec. 18 column titled “Illegal logging exposé touches a raw nerve” (Inquirer, 12/18/12). In that column he claims that his exposé on the people behind illegal logging was such a “bombshell” that it made him unpopular among his friends and relatives. To boost his claim, he cited comments made by his relatives, including the text message sent to him by his sister describing Davao Oriental Gov. Corazon Malanyaon, one of the public officials he accused of involvement in illegal logging, as having been “devastated” by the exposé. This is not true. I would like to correct this impression.
Like any other date on the calendar, Dec. 21, 2012, came and went. And we’re still standing, proof (if it were needed) that the “end of the world” prophecy involved, not a cataclysm that would wipe out humankind, but a transformation.
“You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks.”
Last Dec. 9, my granddaughter Julia turned 12. We held off celebrating her birthday in deference to the hundreds of children in Mindanao who had perished in the wake of Typhoon “Pablo.” But hearing about the young girl, Imee Sayson, who was fished out of the mud alive after being buried for 24 hours by the mudslide that entombed her village in New Bataan town, filled me with enough hope to revisit Julia’s birthday and view it in another light.
WIth the death toll surging past 900 and with some 600 people still missing, “Pablo” has proven to be the most destructive typhoon this year, belying many assurances from the government that it had prepared well for the disaster and that the damage had been minimized. But this may not be the time for blame-pinning. And it is also true that no one was prepared for the magnitude of the destruction, however much that Pablo had been touted as a superhowler. To be sure, with Tropical Storm “Sending” hitting the south at around the same time last year, leaving 1,500 people dead, authorities should have been prepared for more of the same erratic weather pattern affecting Mindanao and the destruction it could
bring in its wake. But storms have a way of defying the worst scenarios.
The benign climate—that was the first thing that was pointed out to me about Mindanao in the early 1980s, when I used to go there as part of a research team studying the banana export industry. Throughout the year, its winds were steady, gentle rain irrigated its fertile soil, its mountains were lush and its rivers deep, and above all, it was never visited by typhoons. That was the reason bananas thrived there.
In the aftermath of Tropical Storm “Sendong” last year, with its death toll of close to 1,500, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources fell under heavy criticism for its failure to complete and/or distribute its geohazard maps that classify areas according to low, moderate, or high susceptibility to floods, flashfloods and landslides. Well, no one can blame the DENR now. Early this year, it reportedly distributed the maps to every city, municipality, and province in the country, and made these accessible to the general public in its website.
For as long as anyone can remember, Mindanao has been blessed with great weather; it is practically typhoon-free. On Wednesday, that blessing turned into a curse, as Typhoon “Pablo” slammed into the island—and hundreds of thousands of residents did not know what hit them. Despite the intense preparations at all levels of government, despite the [...]
Typhoon Pablo came like a raging bull and is now exiting the Philippine Area of Responsibility via Palawan. It spared the Visayas, especially Negros and Panay islands, after it pounded a few Mindanao provinces. A great effort to prepare for the worst in areas considered endangered actually rewarded those who cooperated. Hardly any deaths were [...]
