Cebu’s lack of adaptive capacity

Cebu’s adaptive capacity against natural disasters has been tested by typhoon Odette (Rai) and has been found wanting. The island’s role is important at any point during natural disasters in southern Philippines because it has always been a staging point for relief and rescue efforts, given its strategic location and relatively well-developed infrastructure.

Not this time around. Even if the islands of Siargao and Dinagat in the northeastern part of Mindanao may have had it worse, people in Metro Cebu and southern portions of Cebu felt like typhoon Odette and its aftermath were a catastrophe at every turn.

Electricity and running water were cut off, and it became obvious that repairs to the system could take several weeks before normalcy can be restored. Long lines began forming at gasoline stations, ATM outlets, and water refilling stations a day after the storm. Communication became a problem when mobile networks stayed disconnected.

Impatience grew, tempers flared, and an air of desperation set in especially in areas where people worried where to get clean and safe water for drinking and cooking. The headlines the next day featured government actions to tame overpricing and the long line of vehicles on many streets leading to gasoline stations, just one among the many indicators of uncoordinated self-recovery efforts of individual households.

Devastating typhoons are not new to Cebu. The last one where we had it worst was 31 years ago with typhoon Ruping (Mike). Recent events with typhoon Odette showed that we don’t have much institutional memory about our devastating experiences. I’m saying that as a long-time resident who has seen how Cebu has developed over the years.

For the last 30 years, Cebu has been on a path of unsustainable urban and population growth without the disaster-proofing needed to minimize the impacts of typhoons. Imagine the pressure our narrow and elongated island has to bear when a typhoon knocked down its basic utilities and services that have kept it a liveable place for over four million people.

There are so many cars competing for an inadequate road network, not to mention that we have a virtually non-existent mass transport system. The result is long lines for fuel and bottlenecks in the streets. People need to use their cars to have mobility because resources are often not within a neighborhood's reach. The deep well manual pumps in every sitio or barangay are no longer there to provide people with potable water.

We’ve been building residences in areas where we're not supposed to build them. Or in the rush to build these residential enclaves with middle- to high-class ambiance, we failed to design the community to have sufficient buffer protection against typhoons. We have a row of concrete houses without a buffer zone of trees appropriate for Cebu's terrain and ecology. These enclaves became vulnerable not only to typhoons but also their aftermath because of the lack of walking-distance access to basic resources.

We became over-reliant on modern amenities and systems which a storm can easily knock down. Suddenly we couldn’t make calls, send text messages, and connect to the internet. We didn’t have a fail-safe plan which would allow us to not become desperate when such systems experience massive failure.

A storm is a normal occurrence in life. It is our lack of preparation and adaptive capacity that makes life doubly difficult when a strong storm hits us. And Odette won’t be the last strong one in just a decade if we have to look into the climate change trend of frequent and more powerful typhoons fueled by rising ocean temperatures in the Pacific.