Blame

What does one say in the face of such an awesome calamity?

Our politicians, who amaze me by their skill for opening their mouths to say nothing at all, or at least nothing that seems to make sense, were quick as usual in gunning for the sound bites. They were, minutes after the mudslide was reported, in the usual business of assigning blame.

The blame was, of course, heaped on the usual suspects. Perhaps illegal logging had gone unabated. Government ought to have secured the threatened populations. The local government should have done more. Blah, blah, ad infinitum.

I turned my television off each time a self-important politician appeared to do his usual act of blame assignment in the aftermath of yet another tragedy leaping to yet another level of senselessness. Unless the feet of these politicians were actually in the mud, they do not count. They steal time from the scientists who are better able to help us make sense of this calamity.

According to the scientists, the onset of the La Nina weather phenomenon brought five times the usual level of rain to Southern Leyte. The province also lies along an active geological fault line. The island’s topography is vulnerable to landslides.

From the video I have seen of the disaster site, the forests looked relatively intact. Unlike the tragedy that hit Ormoc, there was little evidence of cut logs rolling down. What came down were large boulders loosened from the steep slopes.

Should this barangays of St. Bernard have been forcibly evacuated before the tragedy happened?

If we removed every settlement that looked remotely vulnerable to a natural disaster, we would have no place to move all of them to. The costs of doing that we could not afford. The population, inasmuch as the disaster that happened was unimaginable, would have objected to forced relocation.

Was the local government negligent?

From what we could gather, the people in the affected area were asked to stay in evacuation center during the night given the continuous rainfall the province was experiencing. But they returned to their farms during the day to look after their crops and attend to their homes. The tragedy happened late in the morning, when the people in the vulnerable villages were exactly where they were most vulnerable.

Was the national government at fault?

We could force the argument, as it was done in the wake of the Ultra tragedy, that government bears responsibility for the fact that people were poor and therefore vulnerable. But that would be stretching it incredibly. The boulders and the mud did not distinguish between rich and poor. This was a classless tragedy.

Were the affected settlements forced to imperiled locations by abject poverty?

That does not seem so. At Ormoc, most of the victims lived perilously along the river bank. In fact, many of them lived on stilts over the river and were most vulnerable to a flash flood.

The people of Saint Bernard appear to have been there for generations. They tilled the fertile soil of a floodplain. They were not exceptionally vulnerable.

But tragedy happens. And when they happen in entirely out of natural causes as what we saw last week in Southern Leyte, it is pointless to try and assign blame.

When a tsunami hit the Indian Ocean and annihilated settlements from Banda Aceh to Phuket and on to Sri Lanka, it was actually possible to blame the governments of the affected area for failing to install a tsunami warning system like we have along the Pacific Basin. But no one bothered to waste time and effort trying to do that.

That natural calamity was of a scale that was simply staggering. The toll it took could not have been significantly mitigated by an early warning system.

Until that unimaginable tsunami happened, it was difficult to say that governments ought to have anticipated it.

To date, there is no tsunami warning system along the Indian Ocean rim. There is little hurry to spend for that. It will probably take eons before a tragedy of that sort happens again. The resources we have on hand are better deployed helping the survivors rebuild their lives.

Is there such a thing as a landslide warning system?

That, too, is difficult to imagine. We could only designate vulnerable zones. Those zones might cover a majority of our communities.

Most of our settlements are along rivers that are prone to flash flooding and are at the foot of mountains. That is not due to any particular carelessness on our part. That is a consequence of that fact that we try to thrive in the fragility of island ecologies.

All of us are, in a way, vulnerable.

We live in an archipelago created by volcanic activity. Inhabitants of small islands, we live in slivers of arable land between mountains and the sea.

We are a country of active fault lines and hyperactive volcanoes. How we have managed to thrive and reproduce so magnificently is a wonder by itself.

We have a population that is well beyond the carrying capacity of our fragile island ecology. There is population pressure on all our resources, including forest land, river banks and steeply inclined areas. There are not enough safe places to locate all our population.

Being all vulnerable is not an excuse, however, for not doing enough to ensure public safety. But in the face of resource constraints, there is only so much we can do to ensure that safety.

Natural calamities can and do happen. We brace ourselves the best we can. We prepare to rescue and comfort victims the best we can.

Given the odds, the inclination to assign blame and politicize calamities every time they happen is almost cynical.