Uneventful and nothing to worry about – as I listened to the whistle of the wind seep through the crevices of our home, these were the thoughts that ran through my mind while I waited for Typhoon Odette to pass. Thoughts of complacency and overconfidence ran, how could I not think like that, I lived to see the day after Typhoon Ruby ravaged our city.
Insensitive and ignorant, that was all that described me during those times, and never could I have ever been more at odds with the truth at that moment.
Typhoon Ruby: An Overview
Back in 2014, in the same month of December, just days before Christmas, one of the strongest typhoons I have ever lived through made itself known. Having the strength of a Category 3 storm, Typhoon Ruby, known internationally as Typhoon Hagupit, made its landfall at dusk resulting in a restless night filled with thoughts of ‘is the roof still intact?’. Watching as our neighbors walked in, drenched and shivering, to our house to seek solace from the storm is a picture that will forever be etched in my mind. How we had to transfer to a higher-situated house, wading in flood water in an almost pitch-black night, the only light coming from a narrow pointing flashlight and waking up to a morning of food rationing and murky mud reaching up to our knees, again could you blame me for thinking so little about the recent Typhoon Odette?
Someone, somewhere, away from the eye of the storm may have been thinking the same thing I did, why? Because they weren’t at the mercy of the storm.
2 billion worth of damage to infrastructure and agriculture as per the report of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), and more than a million Filipinos were taken away from their homes according to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), these are just some of the reported data on damages caused by the Ruby on the different regions it passed through, including the Eastern and Western Visayas, CALABARZON, MIMAROPA, and Bicol.
Typhoon Odette: In comparison
Electricity, internet, cable – things you normally would not have in the middle of a storm, we had it. Aside from the occasional flickering, there was no power outage in our city during the landfall of Typhoon Odette. Known internationally as Typhoon Rai, it was initially recorded as a Category 4 typhoon, but before starting its wave of destruction, it grew stronger into Category 5. Still, the destruction it brought was not in my line of sight, I could hear the wind thrashing outside but that was it. What I did not know, was that it was wreaking havoc in other areas.
Sometime during the night, the power and the internet were cut off and with it, gone was news from outside. I was left unknowing and ignorant of what was happening. When we finally decided to open our generator, news came in about what happened to other communities. Shoreline areas were flooded by seawater, roads and houses were buried by landslides, and low-lying areas were submerged by chest-high floodwater. Siargao Island, widely known as the surfing capital in the Philippines and a most-beloved destination for Filipinos and foreigners alike, was left in demise as lives and livelihoods were taken, homes were mercilessly brought to the ground, power and signal cut off -- disconnecting them from the help they needed most, trees weren’t the only thing to get uprooted, so were the lives of thousands already suffering from a global pandemic. On the island alone, there was a recorded 208 deaths by the Philippine National Police. This was not an experience of Siargao alone, Typhoon Rai was not a forgiving one, its satellite images showed how it spanned the whole of Visayas and Mindanao. According to the WHO, 7.8 million people were struck by the Typhoon, coming from the 11 regions that were situated in the destructive path of Odette.
Mirroring my own experience from Typhoon Ruby was the distress and crumpling events brought on by Typhoon Odette, to tell the truth, theirs was levels worse and my own experience seemed minute when I saw what they had gone through. Not only did they have to face a super typhoon, but they also had to experience it in the middle of a global pandemic. What was already brought down to knees by COVID-19, was razed to the ground by Typhoon Odette. Livelihoods already struggling due to lockdowns were painted a bleaker shade of gray due to the destruction wrought/ Families scuffling to get food to warm their bellies were left both hungry and without roofs on their heads.
Never could I have ever been more wrong than I was at the time I thought Typhoon Odette was of no significance, never could I have been more blind to the potential for affliction and the actual pain it brought to my fellow countrymen. Devastation upon devastation; forever etched in their minds will be the harrowing blight Typhoon Odette was but rise we must, the only way we can go after spiraling downwards, is up, right?
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