Life in a disaster zone

As STAR photographer Edd Gumban walks around Tacloban City, he avoids men who shove clothes for sale at him. Some of those who refused have ended up being robbed.

Night shots of the disaster area are still rare, not because of the curfew or the absence of electricity, but because photographers risk being robbed while aiming their cameras in the dark.

Tacloban, in an idyllic time made famous by a “rose” named Imelda Romualdez, has become no-man’s land.

The devastation from Yolanda is unprecedented in its magnitude, even for Pinoys used to a never-ending stream of disasters. The local government, police and military have many personnel still missing so it’s understandable that disaster response bogged down in the crucial early hours after Yolanda had exited. By most accounts, even yesterday with a state of national calamity declared, the situation in Tacloban was not “under control,” contrary to the claim of the government.

Cadavers were rotting away in the streets, with authorities reluctant to put the bodies in mass graves until relatives – who, we’re sorry to say, might be among the casualties – had identified them.

Health authorities gave the silly assurance that cadavers are not infectious. But decomposition in the open can lead to disease outbreaks. I know from experience that the stench from decaying human bodies is far worse than from decaying rats. If that’s not enough to make anyone sick, it should lead to a loss of appetite and aggravate the hunger now spreading among the survivors.

Reports from Tacloban said some residents have displayed placards telling authorities to take away the cadavers in their neighborhoods before the living become ill from the stink.

In the absence of relatives who can identify the dead, the government can collect and preserve fingerprints or swatches of hair from corpses for DNA testing for future identification.

Our crime laboratories have the capability and (limited) resources for these tasks. But we lacked aircraft or ships to rush people and resources desperately needed to assist survivors, search for the missing and identify the dead in the disaster zone.

Time is obviously of the essence in emergency response. Time is what we lose when we depend on international aid to do the emergency work for us. We are lucky to be able to count on the international community for help each time disaster strikes, even at this time of the year when many governments are running out of foreign aid funding. Uncle Sam immediately deployed aircraft and ships from the US Pacific Command.

Still, nothing beats having our own vessels bringing our own people and rescue equipment ASAP to Tacloban and the other typhoon-hit areas.

These are the logistics needed to reach disaster zones quickly enough so that there’s still life left in victims pulled out of the rubble.

These are also the logistics needed to get food, drinking water and other basic necessities to disaster zones quickly enough before people, out of desperation, begin looting and robbing to survive.

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In 2006, shortly after a denuded cliff face collapsed and buried the town of Guinsaugon in Southern Leyte, the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) launched an art therapy program to ease the trauma of children who survived the killer mudslide.

Seven years later, the program is still up and running, as disaster after disaster followed the Guinsaugon landslide. This time the CCP is mobilizing for the young survivors of monster typhoon Yolanda.

Foreign journalists are descending on Central Visayas – their presence always a sure sign of big trouble in this country – looking for any way to reach Yolanda’s Ground Zero, Tacloban, whose airport and main shipping port are in ruins.

Filipinos, used to frequent disasters natural and manmade, are shocked by the devastation. The scenes from Tacloban, where only a few individuals can be seen moving around in the rubble of flattened neighborhoods, are reminiscent of images from Japan, India and Indonesia after tsunamis.

But maybe our regular brushes with catastrophe keep showing through and we don’t look shocked enough for those who are not used to apocalyptic cataclysms. One foreigner found this remarkable as we chatted about the monster howler with the international name Haiyan when it was approaching the Philippines even as Bohol and Cebu were still reeling from a magnitude 7.2 earthquake and thousands of aftershocks.

What’s it like, living in such a disaster-prone country? That’s a question I’ve been asked many times since last weekend by people I met overseas, as images of Yolanda’s destruction began trickling out of the Philippines.

I guess constant exposure to nature’s fury is one of the factors behind the fatalism of Pinoys, and perhaps even in our sense of humor. In the face of helplessness against nature’s wrath and the numerous misfortunes that befall the less privileged 99.9 percent in this developing country, laughter becomes a coping mechanism.

Sure enough, images reaching our office yesterday included those of children with wide grins as they carried bags of relief goods or displayed crude placards asking for help.

We laugh our troubles away, and pray that tomorrow will be a better day. This coping mechanism eases the need for anti-depressants, but it has also contributed to blunting the urgency of improving the nation’s preparedness for disasters.

The general attitude, it seems, is that s..t happens, and it’s better to just roll along with it, to bend with the wind like the resilient coconut or bamboo. You can’t prevent earthquakes, turn back a typhoon or roll back a storm surge or tsunami like Moses parting the Red Sea.

After friends from other countries ask me what it’s like living in a disaster zone, the next question is what we’re doing about it.

Let’s see… aside from praying and laughing away our worries, we’ve bought rubber boats for police rescue. But our air and sea capability for rescue and relief has progressively weakened.

Do we lack the funds to invest in upgrading our disaster preparedness? At this point I don’t think so; we’re no longer classified as a poor country, and we can now afford to buy fighter jets, helicopters and small patrol ships.

One good suggestion yesterday was to make the multibillion-peso lump sum allocations for the pork barrel of lawmakers part of an emergency fund from which resources can be drawn ASAP, free of red tape, to respond to natural calamities that always arise every year.

Perhaps with the enormous toll inflicted by Yolanda, we might see disaster mitigation placed front and center in national priorities.