Making sense of floods

SO WHAT’S government to do?
PAGASA, short for and better known than its kilometric official nomenclature of Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, announces a low pressure area is entering the Philippine area of responsibility.
PAGASA, in its next bulletin, announces the LPA has developed into a tropical storm packing maximum winds of such-and-such per kilometre at the center and moving at a pace of such-and-such kilometres per hour.
PAGASA, in succeeding bulletins, issues storm warnings, better known as typhoon signals, to help the people in the affected communities take precautionary measures to prevent damage to life and property.
PAGASA has long drilled – from the time of the inimitable weatherman Amado Pineda – into the public consciousness:
Typhoon Signal No. 1 - A tropical storm is existing. Be alert. Classes are suspended for pre-school and primary levels. Winds of 30-60 kph. may be expected within 36 hours.
Typhoon Signal No. 2 - A tropical storm is approaching. Stay indoors. Classes are suspended at the pre-school, primary and elementary levels. Winds of 60-100 kph. may be expected within 24 hours.
Typhoon Signal No. 3 – The tropical storm is dangerous to the locality. Everybody is advised to stay home. Classes in all levels are automatically suspended. Winds of 100-185 kph. maybe expected within 18 hours.
Typhoon Signal No. 4 - Very strong winds of more than 185 kph. maybe expected within 12 hours. God have mercy on us!
Forewarned is forearmed. A truism that has become so trite that it has lost its urgency, and its believability where PAGASA is concerned. What with the predictive performance of the warning agency setting some sordid record of sorts in utter failure. Aye, in saying one thing, with the exact opposite happening.
Thus, PAGASA forecasts heavy rains, and the sun shines through days on end.
Thus, PAGASA forecasts bright, cloudless days, and torrential rains fall thereafter.
So what’s the flooded folk to do?
Total evacuation.
So PAGASA recommended of the areas earlier whipped by the battering winds and inundated by the rampaging rains of Typhoon Pedring.
“Saturated na ang lupa kaya di kayang i-absorb pa ang volume ng tubig na ibabagsak ni Quiel. Pagsama-sama pa ang high tide at nagre-release ng tubig ang dam kaya talagang mas tataas pa ang baha.” So explained weather forecaster Aldczar Aurelio.
“People will die if they will not heed the local authorities.” So warned – direly -- PAGASA OIC Undersecretary Graciano Yumul.
So how many heeded PAGASA’s warnings?
So how many people have died since Typhoon Pedring? Over 50?
So how many more have been driven by floods spawned by Typhoon Quiel to their rooftops and to earthen dikes? By the thousands in the towns of Hagonoy and Calumpit in Bulacan, and in San Simon and Masantol in Pampanga alone.
“Water had never reached even ankle deep here. It was the first time that floods this high hit our area.” Not a few of those stranded were heard to say. Justifying their defiance to government’s call for evacuation.
“There is always a first time we can talk about, and then there is also a “one-time” one cannot anymore speak of.” So smirked Col. Greg Catapang, commander of the 703rd Brigade of the 7th Battalion of the Philippine Army, undertaking rescue missions in the flooded areas. He referred to the fatalities of Typhoon Ondoy, feeling exasperated over the stubbornness of a number of flooded folk to move to safer grounds.
“If we forcibly evacuate these people, some quarters will find cause, no matter how unjust, to cry ‘human rights violations’ or ‘military harassment’,” Catapang says.
So what’s government to do?
Be stupid, at least in the case of one Pampanga mayor.
A parish priest had texted to friends at Typhoon Pedring’s exit that floodwaters were lapping at the second floor of his convento, the highest building in the coastal barangay.
At the onset of Typhoon Quiel, his text messages were pleas for prayers and rescue of his parishioners.
A professor of an Angeles City university in another barangay in the coastal town texted SOS to his dean, his house having been flooded to the rafters.
Apprised of these cries for help during a hastily called emergency meeting on the flood situation in the province last Saturday, what had the mayor to say?
“We have no problem in our town.” At least, none that could not be solved by packages of relief goods that he asked Gov. Lilia “Nanay Baby” Pineda to provide him.
Yeah, looking at the mayor in his Lacoste shirt and pricey leather loafers made it hard to see any problem in his town. It was like listening to Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned.
It was relief goods too – “500 packages po” – that I overheard a barangay chairman of another flooded town asking from the governor, with his mayor making like a matron just out of Fanny Serrano’s parlor by his side.
When the governor asked how many families were affected by the flooding in his area, the village chief said about 5,000 to which the mayor heartrendingly affirmed.
Five hundred packages of relief goods for 5,000 hungry families. It is the stuff that could ignite a war.
Really as stupid as it gets. Relief goods. In many a mayor’s or a barangay chair’s eye, the single solution to any calamity hereabouts, typhoons, floods, fires.
With rescue, relocation, resettlement, rehabilitation absolutely beyond their acutely myopic vision.
With government officials like theirs, what’s the flooded folk to do?
Stay on their rooftops. They maybe in dire need of water and food, but at the least they have greater sense, and sanity, there.
And while at this, try to make sense of President Aquino’s ubiquitous absence during these diluvian days. He has come back from Tokyo ain’t he?
Maybe he needed first to reconnect with nephew Joshua’s Angry Birds vid game. And get his own sense of what’s happening around him.
Uh-oh, I spoke too soon…
After lunch, Sunday. On live TV there’s the President flanked by his defense secretary and executive secretary presiding over a meeting of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
Less presidential, more procedural. That was how the chief executive came to me.
That is yet another calamity. So I had to do what I had to do. Powered off the telly.