A year after Tino, the harder work still lies ahead

This week, Cebu marked the first anniversary of Typhoon Tino which flooded many parts of Metro Cebu, claimed more than a hundred lives, and damaged thousands of homes. In photographs posted on social media to remind us of the tragedy of November 4, 2025, we see people sit on rooftops. Below them, cars are half submerged or piled up in disarray amid heaps of branches and household items.

A day before the anniversary, survivors gathered at Cotcot Bridge, along the boundary between Liloan and Compostela. A resident told The FREEMAN that even a little rain frightens people there now. The United Tino Survivors Network for Justice and Reform renewed its call for accountability. It has been a year, and people are still asking why accountability eludes us.

Before Tino, many of us in Cebu liked to think we were lucky. We had lived through typhoons and earthquakes, but somehow we still thought we would be spared a natural disaster that could take several members of one family in a matter of hours.

Tino was supposed to be a wake-up call. But it seems that, a year later, we are in a systemic inertia in which petitions are filed, hearings and anniversary vigils are held, and press releases are issued, yet all this yields no meaningful institutional movement. A year of hearings, inspections, and complaints over flood-control projects has given survivors few public answers about what went wrong and who will answer for it.

Part of what keeps us stuck, in my view, is the weakness of civil society where government decisions are made. In the Cebu City Council and in the offices that handle, for example, housing, urban planning and disaster preparedness, I see too few people who come from community work. We can still organize forums, hold a prayer rally, or circulate a petition. But we have a harder time putting people in office who can really take our demands through a budget hearing and challenge even their own allies when it gets set aside.

I miss civil society articulators like Alvin Dizon on the Cebu City Council. When I visited his office in 2019, I found a big conference table where I’d expected a councilor’s desk. He said it reminded him that the job was temporary and gave him a place to hear people out and work with them.

The people around a table like that should have a hand in the decisions that shape their city. Building a livable Cebu requires communities that are organized well enough to influence where developers should be allowed to build, what areas need to be protected, and how we spend public money. We need people in government, not just outside of it, who will defend watersheds, fund socialized housing and enforce the easement law.

Pray tell me why it is so much harder to clear a riverbank when a large business is in the way. In 2024, The FREEMAN reported that nearly 30 establishments along the Estero de Parian had yet to remove structures identified as encroachments. How many of those cases have been resolved?

Perhaps we have focused too much of our attention on the flood-control investigation. The need for flood control structures, by the way, is largely a symptom of a lack of urban planning and enforcement of easement laws.

The best flood control begins with the more important task of community building for a livable Cebu, where the mountains, watershed areas and rivers play a critical role. That means putting people in power who can deal with powerful interests, provide socialized housing, regulate housing and land use, and make sure easement laws are followed. They can do all this without much fear of the political cost because there are strong and organized communities behind them. In fact, these leaders come from those very communities.

Sadly, that is something we lack today because organizing across upland barangays, riverbank settlements and coastal communities is the harder, longer-term task. Look at the people in your local government. How many are there because communities organized to put them there? Many, if not all, of those elected had to bear the enormous financial cost of winning.

A year after Tino, it can still feel like we’re screaming silently in a dark room. We can begin to change that by developing and backing leaders from our own communities and by staying organized so they can count on us when the hard decisions come.