‘Why did this happen?’

That was a valid question from President Aquino, as the death toll from typhoon “Pablo” kept going up last week and he visited Ground Zero – Compostela Valley, particularly the town of New Bataan.

P-Noy wasn’t asking about why a natural disaster struck, but why the province appeared to have been caught unawares by Pablo.

Weather forecasters did issue sufficient warnings, played up by mass media, as Pablo (“Bopha” outside the Philippine area of responsibility) roared toward the country.

The ones who heeded the storm alerts, as we gathered from reports, were residents of Cagayan de Oro. That was surely because they still remembered their suffering from “Sendong,” which struck in December last year. When I passed by the city last summer on my way to Malaybalay, Bukidnon, a tent community of Sendong refugees was still there. I was told their relocation sites were not yet ready.

Will tragic experience also teach Compostela residents an indelible lesson on disaster preparedness? The province’s gold-rush site on Mt. Diwalwal, where Pablo also left scores dead or missing, has been hit many times over the years by killer landslides and mine cave-ins. Yet the site continues to teem with small-scale miners, unmindful of the risks in such unregulated activities. Pablo cut off Diwalwal from the rest of Compostela.

A report from Zamboanga featured the brother of a scavenger who was buried in a landslide as he sifted through the garbage in the city dump. The brother said the victim feared losing a day’s opportunity to earn a living more than the typhoon.

Environment officials also observed that poverty played a role in the high death toll. Like that scavenger, small-scale miners and farmers living a hand-to-mouth existence usually do not want to miss a day’s work. But this is where local leadership is supposed to come in. Local politicians should be persuasive enough to get their constituents out of harm’s way.

They’re still digging through mud and debris in the typhoon-ravaged areas of Mindanao and it’s no time for faultfinding. It’s never too early, however, to identify factors that could have mitigated the disaster and lowered the casualty count.

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Local government executives (including barangay officials) are empowered by law to implement forced evacuation in cases of imminent danger.

They are also required by law to prevent squatting particularly in risk areas such as riverbanks and along waterways or esteros.

Yet how many local executives actually enforce such laws? Many of them have even built a power base among the very poor and therefore encourage squatting.

The steep slopes of Baguio City, for example, are no longer covered with pine trees but by informal settlements. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, in a city that has already been hit by a deadly, powerful earthquake, but the settlements just keep expanding.

Driving people away from their homes is admittedly never easy. Urging non-squatters to abandon their homes, even temporarily, can be even more complicated. But it’s not an impossible task, especially when specific warnings have been issued.

In the case of New Bataan, environment officials have pointed out that the farming town is marked as a “high-risk” area for landslides in the geohazard map distributed to all local government units (LGUs).

Perhaps the provincial governor and mayor never bothered to look at the map, or never knew it existed. But LGUs have environment officers who should call the attention of higher-ups to such warnings. The warning can then be disseminated to the public, and residents can decide for themselves if they are willing to take the risk.

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To be fair, ignoring risk warnings is not unique to Compostela. People – and not just Pinoys – tend to have a fatalistic attitude when it comes to risking nature’s fury.

California, for example, remains one of the most populated states in America despite warnings that the entire state could be destroyed in a powerful earthquake. I have relatives there who typify the attitude - if the next Big One is going to strike, so be it. They’ve been hearing the warning for decades.

In quake-prone Japan, many residents of Fukushima have not moved out even after the killer earthquake and tsunami in April last year.

In New Zealand, the capital Wellington sits on an active geological fault. It runs through the city center and underneath key government buildings.

We have long ignored warnings about the Marikina Fault, which runs from eastern Metro Manila through the southern portion and Southern Tagalog.

When government seismologists first released a detailed map of the Marikina Fault several years ago, the initial reaction of homeowners in the danger zone was not to abandon their homes, but to get mad at the seismologists for bringing down the value of real estate properties.

Since typhoons “Ondoy” and “Pepeng” brought cataclysmic floods in Metro Manila and the Laguna de Bay floodplain, disaster mitigation officials have also identified the areas at risk of regular serious flooding. I know a few residents who decided to move out of their rented homes in certain parts of Laguna where the floods took more than a month to subside. But so far, we have not seen any mass exodus from the affected areas, even after this year’s worst floods.

Perhaps the reluctance to leave – strongest, naturally, among those who own their houses rather than rent – is also reinforced by the thought that these days, most places in Metro Manila and surrounding areas can suffer from flooding.

If we leave, where do we go? That is likely the overriding concern of people who are asked to move out of the path of potential disaster.

Our lands are fertile and residents in farming valleys do not readily abandon their homes. Until rampaging floods wash away their houses and their communities are buried in an avalanche of mud.

That was what happened in New Bataan. It’s bound to be repeated elsewhere.