LESSONS FROM 'SENDONG' / DEATH TOLL NOW 1, 018; CADAVERS LITTERED WATERS
MANILA, DECEMBER 23, 2011 (STAR) By Neric Acosta - It was a reverse tsunami. And it happened, all too literally, in the dead of night.
The torrent of silt, floodwaters and countless logs hurtling down from the denuded mountains of Bukidnon and Lanao swept everything in its deathly path.
Entire communities, not only of homes and schools but incalculable repositories of culture and human memories, were gone in a mad instance of Nature, washed to the vast bays of Macajalar and Iligan.
This is my home region, and as we Mindanaoans would claim, of settler or indigenous origin, we are all lumad - born and grown to the place. I am a son of Bukidnon, from the Lumad tribal reference to "people of the mountains."
We are children of the great outdoors, where the sky is endless and forested mountain ranges stretch to far horizons, feeding river basins and farmlands with their copious watersheds. And within any driving distance are the seas of Mindanao, all part of the greater Coral Triangle, with the richest marine biodiversity on the planet.
In the 1970s and even up to the mid-1980s, we remember fog-draped mornings and early afternoon showers, predictable cycles and seasons owing to thick rainforests that carpeted our rugged, mountainous terrain.
[Mindanao, The Land of Promise! Mindanao is the second largest, and the Southernmost island in the Philippines, located just north of Indonesia/Malaysia. Mindanao is a strong agricultural area, supplying a large portion of the food supply for the entire country of the Philippines.]
Mindanao is not called the "land of promise" for nothing. We boast of being typhoon-free and of fertile land, a place of the possible for Settler or Lumad, for Christian or Moslem.
The realities on ground, however, reveal a protracted, different narrative in the midst of natural wealth and beauty: conflict, war, poverty, and, as the events of the last week have shown, increasing environmental damage.
In the wake of Sendong we joined the President in surveying the typhoon's long trail of death and destruction. On a military chopper, from an aerial vantage, the land below looked quite tranquil, the sun had returned and up to the distant hills and plateaus was an endless spread of green.
But jarring this otherwise pleasant tableau were red-brown grids of degraded hillsides and heavy silt that turn riverbeds into eerie mud flats. Further upstream one is witness to the continuing rape of primary-growth forests, in stiff defiance of a logging ban in the country.
From on air to the cramped evacuation centers, the Mindanaoan in me wept. Where the rivers swelled their banks, one could only see upturned vehicles, flattened houses, and heaps of debris. Funeral parlors were reported to have run out of formalin and a rising body count meant human remains could not be accommodated for the affirming rituals of wakes and burials.
We reap what we sow, as it is said, and if the thousands of logs flushed from the denuded uplands that had lined the Iligan coast is anything to go by, then we are now, surely, paying the high price of our folly.
Three years ago a few of us who convened the Philippine Imperative on Climate Change came up with a simulation showing coastal areas in the country, where flooding risks and climate change impacts are high. We had shown that Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, among 25 other "vulnerable climate hotspots" around the archipelago, were prone to storm surges and flooding. While some local officials and sectors were receptive, others called us "alarmists."
Yet as we track the swaths of fury of typhoons "Ondoy," "Peping," "Peding," "Reming," "Quiel," and now Sendong - all in just a matter of a few years - we see that in a warming world and climactic disturbances, such storms are becoming more frequent, more fierce, more destructive.
Ang mga sakunang dadalas, lalakas, at titindi (Calamities will be more frequent, stronger and more intense). No small wonder that the latest risk assessments rank the Philippines one of the five most vulnerable to climate change impacts in the world.
[PHOTO - Ten-year-old Aiza climbed up onto the roof, holding her baby sister, in the rain. As the river had flowed over its banks and entered Aiza's house, it was the only safe spot left to go.]
We can readily cost the damage to infrastructure, property, commerce and agriculture, but disasters of this magnitude often mask the deeper and lasting psychological trauma of victims and families - or, in this case, as the United Nations would call them, "climate refugees." Displacement is not only physical, and when one loses loved ones under these deadly circumstances, bereavement can be profoundly dislocating.
A mother in Iligan who lost her three small children to the onslaught can only wail, "I should have been the one who died." A young adult who scoured funeral parlors all over Cagayan de Oro in search of her mother, only to collapse in sheer grief and outrage when she found her among an array of corpse bags by a landfill. If a local government's response to mounting numbers of corpses is to take them to a solid waste site, then one has to ask how much of our social fabric has frayed.
Disasters offer us the chance to return to our common humanity, as they offer us the opportunity yet again to return to our indivisible ecology.
The author is Presidential Adviser on Environmental Protection and concurrent head of the Laguna Lake Development Authority. As congressman for three terms, he principally authored the Clean Air, Clean Water Act and the Solid Waste Management Act.
FROM MANILA TIMES
'Sendong' death toll now 1,018 Written by : RAFFY s. AYENG CORRESPONDENT
[Navy personnel retrieves the cadaver of another Sendong victim near the Agutayan Reef in Jasaan, Misamis Oriental, on Thursday. PHOTO BY RHAYDZ BARCIA]
THE Eastern Mindanao Command of the Armed Forces of the Philippines has retrieved 16 more bodies, raising to more than 1,000 the number of dead from Tropical Storm Sendong (international codename: Washi), which devastated the cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan in Northern Mindanao last week.
Waters off the two cities were littered with bodies, officials said on Thursday.
The command's spokesman, Col. Leopoldo Galon, said that as of 7 a.m. also of Thursday, the fatalities numbered 1,018, with most of the deaths (666) reported in Cagayan de Oro, followed by Iligan (283).
Deaths were also reported in other parts of Mindanao-Bukidnon province, the Caraga region, and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM)-and in Western Visayas.
Galon said that the search for several missing persons was continuing.
Latest data from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) showed that the number of victims has increased to over 641,000 or 92,964 families.
In Cagayan de Oro, forensic experts from the Philippine National Police (PNP) also on Thursday were still identifying over 130 cadavers through DNA analysis, fingerprint test or dental test.
Senior Supt. Liza Sabong, deputy chief for administration of the PNP Crime Lab, said that this number excluded bodies being examined by other forensic experts from the National Bureau of Investigation.
With the bodies of victims of Sendong still littering the waters off southern Philippines, officials also on Thursday expressed fears that diseases could strike the survivors of the storm.
The official death toll from last weekend's disaster, which swept away shantytowns built near major rivers, has exceeded a thousand. Some authorities, however, said that hundreds more could be missing and might never be found.
NDRRMC chief Benito Ramos said that Philippine Coast Guard and Philippine Navy vessels had been drafted for a huge rescue effort to find bodies floating amid debris up to a hundred kilometers away.
"By this time, there will be no survivors, just dead bodies," he said after Sendong brought heavy rains that spawned flash floods, overflowing rivers and mudslides that buried bodies or swept them into the sea.
Ramos put the death toll at 1,010 while the NDRRMC put the number of missing at 51.
But Mayor Lawrence Cruz of Iligan said that in his city alone, more than 400 residents had been reported missing, with another 283 confirmed dead.
"We could only assume [that] they are dead already. There is so much mud that has to be cleared up and maybe the missing are buried deep inside," Cruz added.
Philippine Red Cross official Gwendolyn Pang said that at least 900 bodies had been recovered and confirmed that some 400 people had been reported missing.
She, however, pointed out that the exact toll might never be known as some of those reported missing may in fact be among the dead, and there could be many more whose disappearance was never reported.
"Many will never be found and we don't know how many are really missing. No one will report them because entire families were swept away," Pang said.
A Navy vessel recovered 11 badly decomposed bodies off the coastal town of Salay on Wednesday, Navy spokesman and Lt. Col. Omar Tonsay said.
"Recovering bodies at sea is difficult because of the sheer volume of debris. You have to ram logs and risk holing your hull or entangling your propellers," Tonsay added.
Ramos said that the maritime search could continue for two more weeks, but warned that many bodies might have sunk underwater and would never be found.
The main priority now is finding permanent shelter for the thousands displaced by the floods, particularly the more than 43,000 housed in cramped evacuation centers, he added.
Health officials have warned of the risk of epidemics breaking out at the camps, which remain without proper water supply and sanitation.
Many of those in the evacuation centers are forbidden from returning home as the flood-prone areas have been identified by government as too dangerous for human habitation. WITH REPORT FROM AFP
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Chief News Editor: Sol Jose Vanzi
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