Lessons yet unlearned

A year ago today, Supertyphoon “Yolanda” made landfall at 4:40 a.m. in Guiuan, Eastern Samar.

Already billed by world meteorologists as the strongest storm on record with its maximum sustained winds of 315 kph, Yolanda tore through a wide swath of Eastern Visayas and Palawan, triggering deadly storm surges that decimated entire coastal communities and obliterated anything else that hadn’t been blown away by the powerful winds. Survivors told stories of babies being wrenched from their arms by raging waters, never to be seen again; of whole houses getting uprooted and washed into the maelstrom with wailing families inside; of village folk ensconced in temporary shelters being forced to flee again as even evacuation centers located farther inland were also overwhelmed by winds and floodwaters.

Yolanda left a near-apocalyptic landscape: about 600 towns and 57 cities in 44 provinces flattened or damaged, more than 28,000 people injured and some 3 million affected in one way or another. The government stopped counting the dead—the corpses littered the coasts and countryside for weeks and sometimes months after the typhoon—at 6,293 last April, despite some 1,800 more persons reported missing. No one is sure of the exact number at this point.

When night fell on Nov. 8, 2013, on Tacloban and other areas devastated by Yolanda and no rescue or aid came, the hungry and desperate survivors roamed the pitch-black wasteland that was once their communities in search of food and water and their missing loved ones. A day earlier, President Aquino had gone on television to assure the public that three C-130 Air Force cargo planes, 32 military helicopters and planes, and 20 Navy ships were on standby with food and other provisions to immediately assist survivors in Yolanda’s aftermath. That aid didn’t come on the first day, or the next. According to reports, food packs began trickling in starting only on the third day, by which time the international media had descended on Tacloban and other parts of the Visayas and were beaming to the world not only the grim vista before them but also the heartbreaking, infuriating government paralysis they were seeing.

As Hurricane “Katrina” did with the presidency of George W. Bush in the United States, so Yolanda did with Mr. Aquino’s administration: It wounded it beyond anything it had ever experienced. Government officials from Interior Secretary Mar Roxas and Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman down the line would explain the delay in aid and services as due to the overwhelming scale of the disaster; whatever provisions were on standby in the provinces, they said, were also damaged or washed away by the typhoon.

Perhaps it was a valid explanation. But on TV, the public could only note with mounting anger how, as the hours and days passed, survivors repeatedly said they had received scant attention from authorities, or none at all. Thousands of valiant volunteers were preparing food packs, locating missing persons, comforting the bereaved, taking stranded families into their homes, or, in Manila, welcoming survivors arriving at the airport and Villamor Air Base and driving them to their kin even as far north as Baguio.

It is inaccurate to say the government didn’t do its part; it also mobilized personnel on many fronts, from soldiers to social workers, to help in the rehabilitation and rebuilding. But the seemingly meager sense of compassion from the beginning—Malacañang disputing the death toll announced by a disaster official (and later sacking that official), Mr. Aquino’s unfortunate retort to a resident’s panicked but understandable request to put Tacloban under martial law to quell looting (“But you did not die, right?”)—helped immensely to cement the public perception that, in the aftermath of Yolanda, the government was weighed and was found clearly wanting.

That perception has not changed much—not when the master plan for rehabilitation and recovery was signed by the President only last Oct. 29, or nearly a full year after the disaster. Not when thousands of families still live in crumbling tents and bunkhouses. Not when the Commission on Audit itself has called out the Department of Social Welfare and Development for the warehouses filled with food packs that went to waste because of improper storage, and for the cash assistance that didn’t reach the survivors. And certainly not when lessons from the Philippines’ worst disaster—such as summoning the political will to ensure that communities are now rebuilt away from danger zones—remain dangerously unlearned.