EDITORIAL - Let us be more prepared for disasters in 2020

The end of 2019 saw disasters hitting the Philippines even as the last days of the past decade ticked down.

There was typhoon Ursula that caused devastation in northern Cebu and other areas of the country, and there was also that fire that hit Barangay Mambaling in Cebu City on Christmas Day, killing one person and leaving four families homeless.

Before that there were the other typhoons as well as the swarms of earthquakes that hit other parts of the Philippines.

Typhoons are to be expected given our tropical location, we get them so often we sometimes use up the entire alphabet giving them names. Floods come with rains that often surprise us in the latter part of the year.

Fires? Well, they just happen because we are very poor when it comes to fire prevention. Earthquakes? They are acts of God that cannot be foreseen.

If nothing else, this teaches us it is best to be prepared for any disaster, whether natural or arising from man-made causes. However, it seems that despite the many times a year we are hit by typhoons, earthquakes, fires, floods, and other disaster it seems that the response, especially government response, is still sorely lacking.

It’s like whenever something bad happens we are dealing with something new, that despite what we regularly face we still don’t perform as efficiently as we should. This is particularly observable when it comes to responding to disasters, especially in providing relief and rehabilitation.

Case in point, some areas devastated by typhoon Ursula are still reeling from the earthquakes last October. Also, until now there are still areas that were hit by super typhoon Yolanda that haven’t been rebuilt or rehabilitated, and that was in 2013 yet.

This 2020 let us hope we Filipinos as a whole, and not just the government, have learned from the events of the previous year and respond to disasters the way we should. They say practice makes perfect, but while we get a lot of the practice part, we never can seem to get close to the part about being perfect.