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INTERNATIONAL

My Philippines typhoon fury

  • 12 November 2013

I was in Cagayan de Oro in the southern island of Mindanao, Philippines on 16 December 2011. All that Friday and through the night, rain poured. Later we were told that over a 24-hour period, rainfall at Lumbia (a weather bureau station) exceeded its monthly average by 60 per cent. This coincided with a 1.2m high tide late that night. But our sense of severe tropical storm Washi (local name Sendong) preceded these meteorological figures.

We felt the pall the following morning before we even saw the river. My prevailing memory is of mud: on the streets, on people with shock-hardened faces. When I did finally see the river, I felt weak in the bones. It had become a monstrous, brown slurry, with barely recognisable traces of dwellings left on its banks. My dad drove us through hard-hit areas, some of which saw floodwaters rise to as much three metres in an hour. In the deepest night, some people simply ran out of time. I called my family several times after we arrived in Australia.

Normality was long in returning to Cagayan de Oro, with clean water being scarce and power down in several areas. It took a while for students to go back to school. My mum said that, even a couple months after, children would whimper at the sound of rain. Literally. That pierced. I have childhood memories of playing in the rain. In the tropics, the rain falls warm and soft. We would muck around, wet as fish, laughing into the sky to catch the drops. But in the wake of Washi, what once filled me with joy instead fills children with fear.

I spent two-thirds of my life in the Philippines and recall no storms or typhoons ever having the sort of impact that Washi had on Mindanao. When I wrote about it at the time, I pointed to human factors such as over-mining and logging, inadequate infrastructure, poor risk management and disaster preparation, incompetence and culpability. Certainly when Bopha hit the Davao region, hard lessons had been learned from Washi, which probably helped mitigate casualties.

But the truth is that whatever adaptive measures may be taken, the intensity and frequency of typhoons have worsened. This is not debatable. This is reality. Excluding super typhoon Haiyan (which made landfall in the Visayas on Friday), five of the 10 deadliest cyclones in the Philippines occurred in the past decade: Winnie in