The cruel paradox in disasters caused by flash floods is that water is the first thing that becomes scarce. In the Philippine city of Cagayan de Oro, mortuaries could not even wash the mud off dead children so they could be quickly identified by parents.
Mud and water. In many areas throughout northwest Mindanao, they are all that remain after tropical storm Washi (local name Sendong) dumped a month's worth of rain in 12 hours. Cagayan and neighbouring Iligan were the hardest hit in the region.
But it was the flash floods that stole through people's homes in the dark hours of Saturday morning that proved fatal. It was astonishingly efficient. In many cases mere minutes spared lives.
Bodies were recovered as the day broke. Many, far too many, were children and elderly. A pall fell over the city as people sensed, even before the toll steeply rose, that the aftermath would be unprecedented.
The effects were impossible to miss. As we drove downtown on Saturday afternoon, we saw people huddling on street corners, covered in mud and looking for shelter. Photos and videos surfaced on social media, revealing riverine and montane landscapes with muddy welts, choked with debris. Water shortages and power cuts further disrupted this city of half a million.
No one was left untouched, even those who had somehow missed the worst.
Cagayan and Iligan are university towns, where school and kinship form the fabric of the community. With more than 35,000 displaced, over 700 confirmed deaths, and nearly 500 unaccounted for, everyone knows someone, or several, who lost their home, their life, or their loved ones.
One of my sister's colleagues drowned. A childhood friend told me one of her sixth grade students is missing. In our wider network, families who somehow kept their houses are struggling to regain normality without clean water.
Cagayanons are reeling. As residents of a port city bisected by the mighty Cagayan River, they had lived mostly peaceably with its waterways. The typhoons that regularly sweep over the Philippine archipelago wreak havoc much further north. Storm tails often break over Macajalar Bay or against the Bukidnon highlands.
Until Saturday, floods could be incredibly inconvenient but not calamitous. The last inundation of comparable scale is on the edge of