Glenda’s aftermath

Thanks to PAGASA, we were all prepared, at least mentally if not physically, for the landfall of Typhoon Glenda last Wednesday.  Classes were suspended in all levels, and most offices also declared an emergency holiday for the workers.  Though we were all prepared for Glenda’s arrival, I’m sure many of us were not prepared for her onslaught. I know immediate friends and family were not as we went about Tuesday as a regular, albeit rainy and gloomy day.

We even scheduled poker that night, a typhoon special as we called it, and waited for the howling winds and torrential rains to come. The trip home was uneventful, the streets virtually deserted as everyone stayed home to avoid meeting Glenda head-on, and I thought that the first major typhoon to hit the Philippines in 2014 was thankfully going to be a benign one. After Ondoy and Yolanda, we have somehow set new standards for typhoons that have become a way of life for us Filipinos.

 In the early morning hours of Wednesday, however, as my wife slept peacefully beside me, I lay awake, amazed at the wrath and the fierceness that Glenda brought along.  Although the house was built as a sturdy structure, painstakingly supervised by my late father who was a civil engineer of old school, I could almost feel it tremble with the gusty winds that continuously pummeled the two-storey house.  In times like this, one would wish for a low-built bungalow that squats low enough to withstand the fierce winds rather than a lofty structure that you know is being mercilessly buffeted from all sides. One can never underestimate nature’s wrath, and I lay awake with this thought.

The next morning, I woke up late from a sleepless night to survey the damage from my terrace. Thick branches and debris were strewn about, and my neighbor’s old sturdy iron mesh, a long, wide strip (it was securely embedded in the concrete fence) that straddled that side of the fence for several decades now to hold his old bougainvillea vines had been totally ripped from the concrete fence and lay crumpled atop our small sedan, my wife Baby’s car parked directly under it. There goes another insurance job, I moaned, and as soon as the rains stopped, the house help and driver lifted the heavy mesh off the car.  Miraculously, the car was undamaged except for a few shallow scratches, the impact having been softened by the thick vines that were intertwined all along the mesh.

Even Milenyo and Ondoy had not done this, so Glenda must have packed fiercer winds.  Because of the brownout, (blackout may be a more apt term as the whole Metro Manila was plunged into darkness) we decided to pack our bags for Palms Country Club for a short go at the tread mill before a nice long and hot shower. Our village, a small hamlet of five streets, was mercifully spared with no uprooted trees but a lot of thick branches snapped off and lying across the roads. On the way out to Alabang, on a street called Concha Cruz, five concrete Meralco posts lay across the road, all of them strung together by thick cables, effectively blocking the street.  I suspect that after one post was felled, the weight of it and the numerous power lines tugged heavily at the next post, and the next, and the next until there were five fallen posts all at once. We wondered when the residents here will have their power restored, confronted with the sheer enormity of the workload that was obvious here.

 At the Alabang-Zapote Road, more destruction greeted us as we saw some damaged portions of the awning of a Honda Motors dealership.  Thankfully, there was no billboard in sight—we learned from past painful lessons.  The Filinvest area where Palms Country Club is located was desolate and a picture of devastation, perhaps in part due to the large areas of clearing there. Filinvest City, as this part is called, prides itself in its green environment with lots of trees, flowering shrubberies and wide open spaces.  The wide avenues here are tree-lined, very gracious and charming in the summer. Now however, after Glenda’s swift nocturnal visit, as we passed one of the main streets called Commerce Avenue through the areas where there were no tall buildings, the trees were all felled as there was nothing to shield them from the merciless winds. All the way to Palms, we saw fallen trees and branches, a big blow indeed to Filinvest’s greening project. Filinvest City’s field crew was already at work to survey the damage and do their part in the clearing operations.

Many stores and restaurants in the mall of Filinvest closed for the day, perhaps because none of the employees could report for work, though some bravely opened to serve the crowd that would surely want to escape the brownout at home.  At the nearby Alabang Town Center, however, it felt almost like an ordinary weekday, but I was told that the mall’s generator was at work. Most of the stores and restaurants were open for business and there was a good crowd for lunch. With no television and no air con at home, malling was the order of the day as everyone strolled around clad in jackets, vying for a table at the row of restaurants.

Ayala Alabang Village suffered more destruction due to the numerous big trees in the village, and as of Thursday evening, the whole village was still without electricity. A friend who resides there noted that, so far, he had only seen about four Meralco trucks to do power restoration, and the earliest they expect to have electricity restored in AAV is Sunday.

The aftermath of Glenda certainly looked like it has outdone Milenyo, which ravaged the metropolis in 2006.  I remember this as I was caught at the height of Milenyo at the World Trade Center where we were scheduled to hold our forthcoming Auto Focus Motor Show. From the security and confines of this huge building, we could see the path of the rampaging wind through the coconut trees across the street as we watched through the glass windows.  My wife Babes later told me that it was the most terrifying sound she has ever encountered, the fear heightened by the incessant howl of the winds. With Glenda, I now know what she meant as I lay sleepless in the wee hours of Wednesday.

Thankfully, though, power was restored in our area as early as 6 p.m. on Wednesday, lunch time in the Valle Verde villages, around 8 p.m. in Greenhills and 9 p.m. in the Oranbo area in Pasig. Kudos to the Meralco technical staff who worked tirelessly round the clock to restore normalcy in the city.

Mabuhay!!! Be proud to be a Filipino.

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