Waiting for Helen

Non-stop rain for days. Heavy or intense rain for hours. Dams releasing water or overflowing. Rampaging rivers and impassable streets.  Calls, texts, tweets asking for help from people stuck on their roofs for hours. Dramatic footage of rescuer with a child. Rescuer is using his bare hands on a flimsy-looking nylon rope to pull himself and the child across raging floodwaters. Bodies retrieved from a landslide. Children and babies lying on folded cardboard in evacuation centers. Wrinkled and stooped old men and women lining up for relief goods. Government officials visiting flood-hit areas and distributing food.

As usual, the silver lining was the kindness and generosity that people showed in the wake of another disaster. Schools and churches quickly set up relief centers to prepare cooked food and aid packs for distribution in evacuation centers. Ways of helping and donating to organizations engaged in relief operations were shared in social media. Everyone seemed to want to help.

As usual, there were light, if foolhardy, moments. Foreign tourists went swimming in Lagusnilad, an underpass in Manila. Children cavorted in flooded streets. It looked as if only the people in serious danger of losing their lives were not smiling. Everyone else behaved as if there was a party, even if their houses and all their things had gone underwater. People just never stopped smiling.

Everything about last week’s deluge in Metro Manila and other provinces in Luzon felt like a repeat of Ondoy in 2009. But there was no typhoon, some people observed. Mr. Ramon Paje, our Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources, declared that what happened is the “new normal” and blamed climate change.

Interviewed on television, he said that “there is nothing we can do but adapt to climate change, and the only way we could be prepared for the impact of climate change is to accept that these recent developments in our country, like intense weather disturbances, heavy rainfall, as well as the long dry season, are now the ‘new normal.’” He went on to tell people to heed warnings to evacuate danger zones. He also talked about water-impounding dams in the uplands as a solution to flooding.

His statements were what I expected he would say and I felt disappointed, as usual. It would have been surprising if he said what everyone else knows and pointed out the obvious: The waterways are clogged and need to be cleared.  The watersheds are bare and therefore remaining forests should not be cut and reforestation measures should be more effective. Rainwater has nowhere to go and cementing of all available surfaces should be disallowed. While he might not be in a position to implement these solutions, it would have meant something if the Environment Secretary acknowledged that these are important environmental problems with difficult, but doable, solutions.

It has been close to three years since Ondoy struck. Maybe government response is better with regards to weather forecasting, information sharing and early warning systems, and search and rescue operations. The more important problems of proper land and water management have still not been addressed. The Comprehensive Land Use Act has not been passed. Laws on rivers, seashores, and waterways are not implemented. Our watersheds are treeless and cannot hold water.

And so I wait, uneasily as the rest of Luzon probably waits, for tropical storm Helen to arrive and make her presence felt. If this is the “new normal,” I should probably buy more canned goods. And rain boots.  And maybe even a rubber boat.

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