Perfect storm

There were in fact two disasters that Supertyphoon “Yolanda” wrought. The first was natural, the second man-made.

The first was Yolanda slamming into the Visayas, particularly Leyte, particularly Tacloban, with a fury we’ve never known before. The before-and-after pictures of Tacloban, the one lush with greenery and the other bare and barren, the leafless trees looming in stark relief across a gray landscape, brought tears to the eyes. And that was from afar. The scene up close, an entire city shattered, debris everywhere, bodies lying on the ground, people who had lost their homes and their loved ones wandering around aimlessly, numbed the senses.

The second was the disaster that attended government’s attempts to cope with this disaster. The second is probably the bigger one. It is certainly the longer and more debilitating one. The first (b)lasted only a few hours, leaving a city, or province dazed in its wake. The second has already lasted more than a week, leaving a country stunned and furious, wailing and cursing, frazzled and riven in its condemnation and defense of government.

Much of the disaster that befell government came from public perception, or government saying the most unfortunate things. P-Noy himself contributed to it. The immediate aftermath of the supertyphoon, when Tacloban lay in shambles, was a moment that called for inspiration and reassurance. Or for some Churchillian “blood sweat and tears” message, rallying the country to come together to fight off not a gathering storm but one that had already come. It was a moment that called for inspiring belief in government as a pillar of strength amid the hunger and death, amid the grief and despair. The country was no less at war than in the shooting kind.

Alas, P-Noy instead took issue with the number of the dead. By itself, that meant nothing, and under ordinary circumstance might even have been admirable. P-Noy had done it before, during storms and floods, while camped out in Pagasa, monitoring developments, making sure figures were accurate. But in the face of the awe-inspiring vision of the Apocalypse that was streaming into TV—unforgettable sights like a small group huddled in a makeshift shelter, hungry and cold, some of them keening for the loss of family, while the bodies of the dead teemed around them, they have nowhere else to put them in and too tired and too dead inside to do it—it sounded insensitive. It sounded like denigrating the public ordeal. And insensitive was how the public, particularly those with relatives in the Visayas, found it.

Just as well, P-Noy took issue with how Tacloban’s local officials, and the Romualdezes in particular, took care of their province and city. It was playing the blame game, Leyte officials themselves put it. It didn’t just sound misplaced, it sounded cruel.  It was all the local governments could do to remain a government: Their own police, soldiers and service-givers had been devastated, some had died, many had relatives that died, they were themselves desperate to survive. The task had fallen on the national government. And where was the national government?

It didn’t help that Korina Sanchez rebuked Anderson Cooper for asking the same question. Korina is not a public official, but she is the wife of a public official, indeed the wife of the one public official widely seen as wanting to become the highest official of the land after P-Noy. All she did, quite apart from bringing the wrath of the world on her head, was draw attention to her husband, the head of the police and local governments, and his inability to supply either or both.

There are limits to what the local governments can do when beset by a catastrophe of these proportions, and these are biblical

proportions. That was how Barack Obama won a second term: Hurricane “Sandy” did it for him. Overnight, all the objections about the federal government doing a Big Brother vaporized, as the victims called desperately for it to intervene. Except that in our case, unlike New York and New Jersey, Tacloban did not just need being helped by the national government, it needed being temporarily replaced by it. Local government had been swept to the sea, or left jerking spasmodically around like a zombie.

The social media lashed out with the same fury as Yolanda. But it’s not just perception that caused government to experience its own Yolanda, it’s reality too. Specifically the chasm between the awesomeness of the blight and the awesomeness of the slight. Government looked like a deer caught in the headlights, frozen to the ground, dazed and confused. Government’s defenders would defend it by saying that Hurricane “Katrina” froze government too. But quite apart from the fact that the US government, then headed by George Bush Jr., was dazed and confused about a lot of things, Katrina did not bring images of dead bodies strewn alongside near-disembodied forms, huddled in the cold and dark, hungry and grieving. These are scenes from a war, not unlike the siege of Leningrad.

The foreign media, however transient or “paratroop,” however blithe and impressionable, were not far off the mark. They were merely echoing the sentiments, unspoken or roared out, by the despairing and angry: Where was government?

Well, it’s back there now, with no small help from volunteers, local and foreign, with no small help from the international community, with no small help from a nation roused to frenzied bayanihan all over again by the spectacle of the mother of all disasters. I do hope the recriminations dissipate and disappear over time, there is so much to do and so little time to do it. I do hope government recovers from the perfect storm that hit it.

I do hope we recover from the perfect storm that hit us.