Resilience

The sun came out bright and hot yesterday, with no dark clouds boding more rain. We know what this means: we’re back to business as usual.

It’s also business as usual for those living in areas that have been identified by scientists to be at high risk of being hit by disasters, including flash floods and landslides.

Resilience has become a buzzword in disaster mitigation. But the attitude in many identified disaster-prone areas across the country smacks more of fatalism rather than resilience. And it can put more lives at risk.

Yesterday rescue teams continued to look for dozens of people still missing after a landslide buried a bunkhouse in Itogon, Benguet where miners and their families had taken shelter at the height of Typhoon Ompong. The mayor of Itogon said he had sent police to evacuate residents and small-scale miners in the area, but the people shooed the cops away.

Science Undersecretary Renato Solidum points out that the government has complete hazard maps of the entire archipelago, identifying in detail each area’s risks for natural calamities including landslides, storm surges, flooding, lahar flows and earthquakes. Tax money was spent to prepare these maps.

Ordinary folk may not bother with such hazard maps. But local government units must have personnel who study the maps, or at least coordinate with agencies involved in disaster mitigation so that the maps can be properly interpreted and the risks conveyed to the public.

There are local government units that do this, organizing briefings by government scientists in high-risk communities. Similar briefings are conducted by private groups. Solidum, facing us on “The Chiefs” last Monday on Cignal TV’s One News channel, put it bluntly: the briefings are for those who could die if they don’t get out of harm’s way.

Solidum says there are people who heed the warnings. Many others don’t. “It can’t happen to me” is a common belief when disaster threatens. Or else such people have an abiding belief that if disaster strikes, they will survive and rise from the ashes.

This type of resilience is fine, but it should not lead to foolhardiness that can lead to deaths during disasters.

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Solidum was joined in our show by urban planner Paulo Alcazaren, who brought with him a scale model of a sloped community to show what happens when incessant rains loosen the soil, uproot trees and wash away the ground where houses have been built.

Alcazaren and Solidum used the scale model to show viewers what to watch out for as a guide to evacuation before an impending landslide. Among the earliest telltale signs is that trees begin bending over from the roots. Another is the heavy pooling of soil at the foot of the slopes. 

Heeding such warning signs seems commonsensical. But such signs don’t always lead to landslides, so people take their chances and stay put. Ignoring such signs tends to be highest among those who make their living digging through rock and soil: miners.

Being one of the largest mining areas in the country, many parts of the Cordilleras have been identified to be at high risk for landslides.

There have been numerous killer landslides in the Cordillera mountain region. Yet people keep setting up homes and other buildings on slopes that clearly look vulnerable to a landslide – and not just in mining communities. One look at all those houses perched precariously cheek by jowl on the slopes of Baguio City, obliterating the pine trees, and you will agree with Alcazaren when he says that the country’s summer capital “is a disaster waiting to happen.”

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Those houses were built on Baguio’s slopes even after the 7.7 magnitude earthquake in July 1990 that killed over 1,600 people in Luzon, about 80 of them at the collapsed Hyatt Terraces Hotel alone in Baguio.

Solidum, who also heads the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, is frustrated by the public’s indifference to warnings not just on typhoons but also earthquakes. Even a minor temblor, he stressed, can dislodge soil loosened by several days of heavy rain. This was what happened in the village of Guinsaugon in the Southern Leyte town of St. Bernard in February 2016, when a mild 2.6-magnitude quake brought part of the mountain face thundering down, burying the village and at least 1,126 people.

Super Typhoon Yolanda also claimed many lives along the coastal communities of Tacloban, where many residents ignored warnings and refused to evacuate to safer ground. Many of the victims remain missing and are believed to have been washed out to sea.

Yet when the story about Yolanda had died down, people in coastal communities in other parts of the country continued to resist evacuation during typhoons and potential storm surges.

As stories emerging from Itogon indicate, the risk of landslides is brushed aside by people who depend on the mountain for their livelihood. The village of Ucab and much of Itogon, according to reports, are heavily dependent on small-scale mining. The wife of the town mayor, according to some reports, is one of the buyers of whatever the miners find, although the mayor said his wife no longer engages in this trade.

Whether or not the wife is still trading in minerals, greater political will could have saved lives in Ucab. Equally important, however, is an attitude change among people. Resilience does not mean merely being able to rise from the destruction unleashed by a natural disaster. It also means adopting measures to make communities more resistant to the death and destruction spawned by a calamity.

Resilience starts even before a typhoon strikes.