No retreat, no surrender…not yet

It’s a little disconcerting that some international news reports are beginning to say that the time for rescue efforts may be running out and that it might soon be time for recovery operations to begin in earnest. I hope these instant "analyses" are wrong.

It is manifestly too soon to give up on any remaining survivors among the 1,350 or so that are reportedly still missing. This so-called shift from rescue to recovery simply means that someone is saying that there are two chances, slim and none, of finding anyone alive beneath the up to 10 meters of mud that swept over barangay Guinsaugon in St. Bernard town, Southern Leyte. This judgment is way, way too premature.

But fortunately despite all these dire prognostications, it looks like the men and women on the ground are not giving up at all and, if anything, have stepped up efforts considerably. They’re getting a lot of help from Taiwanese and, would you believe, Chinese rescue experts, as well as Malaysian and American teams.

Our own miners, who know all about digging operations in search of buried colleagues, even mountain climbers with sophisticated search equipment, are heading for or are already at the site. These dedicated men and women, I am sure, don’t give a damn about the naysayers. They should be helped and encouraged, not only with our prayers but with all possible material assistance we can muster.

Still, even as we refuse to surrender easily to the wrath of nature, it will be an uphill battle. The foreign assistance is much appreciated, but it’s times like these when the awful realization of our lack of preparedness and ability to handle natural calamities comes crashing down on us.

That the areas of potential disasters are remote cannot be an excuse since we already know there are many remote and thinly inhabited areas throughout our archipelago that are difficult to access. Although we can’t anticipate all possible calamities, we should now be more serious about readying the equipment and, more important, the skilled manpower to at least afford a swift and effective first response to tragedies like Southern Leyte.

Even as our government pours substantial time and resources to St. Bernard, other natural disasters are reported in other parts of the country. This is not an "exceptional" time for disasters. We should take this condition as a given in today’s world. We shouldn’t spend inordinate time trying to "analyze" why this is happening.

We should just divert resources from less urgent things (I’ll leave you to think of what those other less pressing matters are, but there are many). Rather, we should give due regard to such possible "extinction" or Armageddon events like global warming, ozone depletion, bird flu pandemics and even excessive human population which is straining this planet’s resources. This is not to spread a perennial "sky-is-falling" or doom-and-gloom panic. This is merely to encourage prudent realism, and healthy disrespect for empty promises which do not produce measurable results.

Take what may at first appear as a relatively basic necessity, electrical power. News reports have it that even as I write this, electricity at the rescue sites is still uncertain and intermittent. Obviously, the pace of rescue work will be seriously affected by the lack of power, especially when darkness sets in. The rescue work can’t take a break when night falls. All the rescuers know full well that every minute counts in the race to find any survivors who may be on the brink of death.

At Vice President Noli de Castro’s radio program last Saturday morning, I heard Senator Fred Lim calling frantically, suggesting that the most important thing that rescuers at the landslide site in St. Bernard needed were generators to provide lights to enable them to work through the night trying to rescue persons still buried under meters of mud, sludge and garbage.

Government rescuers in situ responded by phone that generators put together by the local government were on the way. By the time, however, precious hours had gone by. Rescue work had to be suspended when night fell because no electricity was available. It was considered too dangerous for the rescuers to proceed.

After a couple of days and understandable difficulty in pinpointing the exact site, the school where over 200 children and teachers were apparently caught by the mudslide was finally located. They are among 1,350 people still reported as missing.

The problem is that, as far as I know, no one has any real handle on how many people exactly are missing. Some reports still claim as many as 3000 people dead, injured or unaccounted for. That, however, seems like more of guess than an off-the-cuff estimate. The hope, of course, is that the actual casualty number will be much less.

The mud and soft earth covering the overrun barangay of Guinsaugon is reportedly like quicksand which swallows heavy earth-moving equipment. International news networks British Broadcasting Corporation and CNN correspondents reporting from the site are saying that rescuers will have to manually dig out any survivors and, eventually, the bodies of victims. It also looks like, despite the presence of several foreign rescue teams armed with equipment to detect human heat and sounds, and with dogs which can sniff out humans, alive or not, most of the actual physical work will be done by Filipinos.

International aid, both in terms of men, materiel and money is coming in. The Philippine National Red Cross was activated within a few hours of the landslide. The International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent have also sent valuable assistance. Many countries, including the United States, France and Japan, among many others, are sending funds not only to help rescue efforts but also to take care of survivors.

There will be enough time for finding culprits later on. Some bloviating senators should immediately cease and desist from gratuitous finger-pointing about the role of illegal loggers, for example. Initial indications from the scene are that the mountain from which the landslide started was not a denuded area. This, however, needs to be investigated and, in the nature of things in this country, inevitably will.

All in good time. At the moment, the first priority is to find survivors. A very close second would be to make sure the survivors are given the medical attention they require, and that their daily needs are provided for. Everything else can wait.