There have been quite a few times I missed being an on-the-spot witness to important, life-changing events. When the earthquake of July 16, 1990 struck Luzon, wreaking death and destruction in my hometown of Baguio City, I was snorkeling off the coast of Tataran Island in western Palawan. There was not a ripple in the water, not the slightest tremor in the seabed where the blue-green parrot fish and silvery creatures darted in front of my goggles. I rose from the surf towards sunset to admire the brilliant palette of the fiery red, violet, pink and orange sunset on the China Sea that could have been the loveliest in the world, even before Pinatubo.
It was past six when I returned to the nipa hut of the Cajilas where I was staying. There was not the usual merriment of the children in anticipation of the evening’s simple fare. The fisherman’s family seemed all tense as they huddled around the transistor radio. The couple, Canot and Fely, filled me in on what the AM announcer was so frenziedly going on about. There had been an earthquake throughout central and northern Luzon sometime around four in the afternoon. More than a thousand casualties had been reported from Nueva Ecija all the way to the Cordilleras. Buildings and houses had collapsed; people had been pinned down or crushed to death during those moments that I had been gliding blissfully in the warm surf of Malanut Bay, a universe away from the earthquake’s epicenter.
The following day I made the three-hour bumpy bus ride from Quezon town back to Puerto Princesa to catch a return flight to Manila, or at least be able to make a phone call from the post office or a hotel, mobile phones being a rarity then. I could not contact Baguio, and there was no available flight for at least two days, if I remember right. It was some time before I could make it back to Manila, but still could not go home to Baguio because Kennon and Naguilian were impassable due to massive landslides. Eventually I was to learn that the whole family was intact and safe, and it was only our house that had taken a beating after a massive shaking that had caused the walls to crack, the chandelier to swing, and my mother’s antique Chinese vases to topple and shatter. My brother’s and sisters’ families also had to live in tents for several days, during which aftershocks continued to rock the mountains.
In the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 26, 2009, my mother and I were at home in Baguio on our comfortable recliners, watching a TV program on a cable channel. It had been an overcast day in the mountains. We knew there was a typhoon brewing somewhere near the country and was about to make landfall, but the fact that it was hardly raining in Baguio meant that some other unfortunate place was going to be hit very soon. Sometime later, my cell phone buzzed. A friend was sending out not so much a distress signal as a dire announcement to all and sundry that, like so many others, her family had already spent several hours trapped in their car, under driving rain, amid floodwaters on Katipunan Avenue. We immediately switched to the news channels and sure enough, the world below Baguio was in crisis, caused by a tropical depression called Ondoy (international codename: Ketsana).
We watched the unfolding tragedy on television covered live by all the news channels. Again and again, the cameras showed the swollen Marikina river, carrying off flailing human figures desperately clinging to whatever object floated on the surface of the swift and angry current, bobbing up and down between the waves, briefly disappearing under a bridge then reappearing and sometimes not. The screen would then show aerial images of whole towns with only rooftops visible on the inundated landscape, like islands where survivors huddled as a rising sea closed in, even as rain continued to pour and darkness descended.
It was a veritable end of the world for the many who suffered from the devastation of Ondoy: the drowned, the missing, the maimed, the impoverished, as well as the affluent who were suddenly made homeless. Natural tragedies that kill thousands or hundreds of thousands are so overwhelming as to have the quality of banality or ordinariness that numbs, but in the midst of this recurring nadir of human experience, there can be moments of drama that move people to mourn or, if they are able to, lend a helping hand.
We will never forget the pitiful sight of people attempting to either get home in the gathering wind-whipped, rain-lashed darkness, or to get out of their houses and onto their rooftops, as well as the uplifting sight of people turning up to offer their services in the countless rescue and relief operations. A Good Samaritan’s gesture ended in further tragedy when he succumbed to fatigue, and drowned after having rescued several people from the deluge. The worst disaster in decades had produced a hero in Welmar Magallanes.
Years before the deluge of Sept. 26, there was, in July and August 1972, a spate of storms, beginning with Typhoon Gloring, whose effects resembled in many ways the devastation wrought by Ondoy. That inclement period was one I lived through not, as in 2009, as a couch spectator watching nature’s wrath unfold on TV, but as one of many who took part in relief operations in Central Luzon for more than a week.
The July-August floods of 1972 have been described as among the most destructive in our country’s history. While inundating only some parts of Metro Manila, it submerged extensive areas in the provinces of Pampanga, Tarlac and Pangasinan, partly caused by the overflowing of the Agno, Tarlac and Pampanga river systems. These catastrophic floods across the central plains would happen again in May 1976, and most recently in October last year, in the wake of Ondoy, with Pangasinan bearing the brunt of the deluge brought about by the rains of Typhoon Pepeng, which entered Northern Luzon twice in the space of a few days, and more precipitously by the release of excessive water from the San Roque Dam.
In 1972, I was a young political science instructor then at UP, and was a member of activist groups like Paksa (writers) and Sagupa (faculty members) who joined mass actions and social immersion projects. Well, no better case of immersion could have presented itself than the call for volunteers in Diliman to join a busload of relief workers transporting boxes of medical supplies, donated clothes and other necessities to the waterlogged communities of Central Luzon. Whole towns were isolated from markets, hospitals and government offices by the artificial ocean created by days of torrential rains and the overflowing of rivers across Central Luzon.
Operasyon Tulong was organized by a group of doctors and UP activists, which included Dr. Juan Barrameda Escandor — nicknamed Johnny or Jerry — and which brought together medical personnel from the Philippine General Hospital and UP faculty members and students. If memory serves, it was the official bus of the College of Physical Education (years before it morphed into Human Kinetics) that we used to transport the relief goods and ourselves to our designated area of operation, which was Pangasinan, with other Manila groups assigned to Bulacan and Pampanga.
Our mercy bus was not in the best of shape even in the best of times. It would take at least a couple of days before we could reach Pangasinan from Diliman. Long stretches of MacArthur Highway were submerged in waist-deep water, and several times the bus, heavily loaded with relief goods, had to be pushed, even as heavy rains poured through the night. We were all cramped inside the bus as it wended its way slowly through the flooded highway crossing Bulacan, Pampanga, Tarlac, all the way to Pangasinan. Our group was composed of faculty members and students, and doctors and nurses from the Philippine General Hospital and the UP College of Medicine.
The non-medical people in our group had to learn some quick lessons in pharmacology, and by the time we were spreading out through the flood-devastated areas around Dagupan in fishing boats, we knew by heart the anti-helminthics, antipyretics, antibiotics, anti-diarrheals, antihistamines, and other drugs we were distributing along with canned goods and dry clothes and blankets to the stricken. There were two areas to which we were assigned: a fishing village and a farming community deeper inland, where families had lost homes and belongings, and were suffering from an infestation of worms, from infected wounds, from fever and other ailments, not to mention going hungry every day for weeks on end. There were no government relief operations in sight during the week that the team stayed there. The floodwaters had begun to recede, so that where our boat could not go, we had to struggle on foot through rivers of mud to reach the victims.
What I will always remember from that week of immersion are the images of poverty made unbearably worse by natural disasters, and the quiet fortitude of a leader like Dr. Escandor, who showed us all how to endure difficulties and discomforts, and whose concern for the suffering poor was palpable in the way he talked to them and ministered to them. That would have surprised no one who knew him well. Although he was chief resident of Radiology at PGH, a cancer expert who headed the research department of the hospital’s Cancer Institute, he also volunteered to do medical work in the barrios of Central Luzon, Mindoro and in his hometown of Gubat, Sorsogon.
Sometime after the declaration of martial law, Dr. Escandor joined the resistance movement against the Marcos regime. In 1983, he died after an alleged encounter in Quezon City with military intelligence agents. His autopsy showed that he was possibly caught alive, because his body bore signs of torture: his moustache plucked out, several bones in his body broken. And his skull, according to a news report, had been stuffed with trash, rags, a man’s brief and plastic wrap.
As in last year’s Ondoy aftermath, the relief operations at the height of the July-August floods in 1972 brought out the best in thousands of volunteers from all sectors: students, professionals, church people, journalists, and some government officials. But there had to be the regular downside, too, with reports of looting of abandoned homes, and the hijacking of relief goods by both brigands and unscrupulous local officials.
I seem to have lived through storms and floods all my life. I grew up in Baguio, which was always beset by typhoons, being in the regular path of tropical depressions throughout the year. I spent my annual summer vacation in my mother’s hometown of Malabon, Rizal, which up to now gets regularly flooded any time of the year, but especially during the monsoon season.
Only once was there some fun and profit to flooding in Malabon. One rain-filled summer’s end in the 1950s, the river rose to unprecedented levels and the fishponds overflowed, bringing schools of bangus and tilapia to the eskinitas, backyards and ground floors of our neighborhood. We grabbed any container that could hold the bonanza from the floodwaters. Spectacular as it may have seemed, the Great Flood in Malabon was not one of those major, life-changing events. We only ate better during the next few days. We must have wished that that kind of flooding would occur more often.
Otherwise, a Philippine storm, cyclone or typhoon is one of those natural events that we least want to go through. To paraphrase Neil Diamond, “Leave, don’t stay even for just a while / don’t stay to let me look at you / It’s been too long, life’s been hard with you.”
With its memories of floods and of martial law. September always mourns.