‘Ondoy’ brings out the best and the worst in Filipinos

‘Ondoy’ brings out the best and the worst in Filipinos
(Following is the transcript of the segment "Analysis by Winnie Monsod" which aired on News on Q on October 2, 2009. Prof. Winnie Monsod is the resident analyst of News on Q which airs weeknights at 9:30 p.m. on Q Channel 11.)

In the wake of Typhoon Ondoy, the latest reports show that at least 246 people have died, with 37 still unaccounted for; one in every 11 families in Metro Manila and Central Luzon were affected by the flood, with over 567,000 people still crowded in evacuation centers.

Property damage has been assessed at at least P4.67 billion. And no one has yet tried to estimate the loss in economic productivity as well as losses from dislocation.

No one questions that Ondoy was a natural calamity. But the damage wrought cannot be wholly attributed to nature alone.

Human acts and omissions contributed substantially to that damage, and must not be exculpated.

To wit:

PAGASA has equipment that will allow it to detect, among others, the wind velocity of tropical cyclones and their possible path.

What PAGASA still does not have — which is available — is the equipment, called Doppler radar, which, I am informed, allows the rain content of such storms to be determined as well — and therefore the intensity of flooding that might occur.

The irony of it is that this Doppler radar costs — and I got this from Google — a mere $300,000 to $1 million, or roughly P15 million to P50 million pesos.

Why “mere”? Because it is much less than the P70 million that is reportedly the yearly pork barrel allocation of a single congressman, and peanuts compared to a Senator’s annual P200 million share of that same pork.

Or how about comparing it to the cost of a Presidential foreign trip?

The cost per day of her trips two years ago (2007) came out to $255,000 from $46,000 thousand a day in 2002.

It is safe to say that by $2009, these trips average about $300,000 a day.

Therefore the Doppler radar would cost be roughly equal to anywhere from one day’s to a little over three days’ foreign travel of the President.

In any case, it would pay for itself almost immediately, in terms of the number of the number of lives saved, and property damage reduced.

Yes, PAGASA did issue flood and landslide warnings as early as September 24 – but saying that there may be flood and landslides is a different kettle of fish then saying something to the effect that “400 centimeters of rain is expected in the next ten hours — more than the average rainfall in a whole month.”

That will surely catch everyone’s attention, including the authorities.

In early August of this year, the state of Kentucky experienced its version of Ondoy, with more rain falling in one day than was normal for the month (actually Kentucky had worse experience — there was also lightning caused fires as well as hailstones).

But the authorities and the people were properly forewarned, so that while property damage was extensive, there were no deaths (except for nine animals in an animal shelter which was flooded).

Then you have the NDCC, which not only seemed to have ignored PAGASA’s warnings, but also seemed clueless as to what areas to prioritize as for rescue operations, depending — again seemingly — only on the texts that were coming in. This has to be inexcusable.

Architect Jun Palafox, who has an MA in environmental planning, informs us that as early as 1977 — or 32 years ago — the Metro Manila Transport, Land Use and Development Planning Project, funded by the World Bank, already identified the areas in Metro Manila that were vulnerable to massive flooding, probably because they were natural basins.

He should know.

He was part of that report, working for the DPWH under then Minister Dave Consunji, one of the best, if not the best DPWH heads we have had.

By the way, that report singled out Marikina Valley as problematic.

If this information had been an input to the NDCC plans, the boats should have and could have been transported to those specific areas as soon as the flood warnings were sounded, instead of waiting until the floods were upon us before starting the deployment.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And so we had the spectacle of the Army and Coast Guard boats, 25 from the army and 18 from the Coast Guard, unable to be deployed to the areas where the floods were at their highest or their most dangerous, because by then, the roads were impassable with stalled cars.

The rescue teams from Subic could not reach Manila promptly either, for mostly the same reasons.

Which brings us to the third factor in a man-made disaster scenario.

We all saw terrible scenes of stalled cars on the roads, some being carried away by the force of the current.

But there is another angle to that.

In Marikina, for example, car owners, in their effort to keep their cars from being flooded, brought them to higher ground and parked them there.

The higher ground, unfortunately, happened to be the main thoroughfares — as in Bonifacio Avenue leading to Marikina.

What happened then was that cars on the road that wanted to go the sides to wait out the floods had no side to go to. So they stopped (or were stalled) in the middle of the road.

Which brought traffic to a complete standstill — and then prevented rescue operations from being undertaken.

And speaking of the public, there may have been some excuse for not listening to PAGASAs flood warnings on September 24 — how many times, after all, has PAGASA made the wrong call? — but there was no longer any excuse for not heeding the call of the local government executives — Marides Fernando of Marikina, for one, who asked sent out evacuation notices, asking the people to move to higher ground, because the Marikina dike was already in danger of being breached.

It may have been already too late for some; it also could have been that the barangay executives did not do their job well; but for others, the warning was heard, but not heeded.

They preferred to stay at home. Even when they were being rescued, they signaled that they would rather stay, at home, and just asked for food to be dropped to them.

And why? This is the most tragic part of all:

Because they were afraid to leave their possessions behind, afraid that these would be looted or robbed — they had no faith in the ability of government to provide security.

And a lot of those that did leave were — you guessed it — indeed looted and robbed.

Ondoy brought out the best — and the worst — in our people.

What can be done to reduce the man-made part of this disaster?

Well, as far as the PAGASA equipment is concerned, this is already being addressed by a bill that has already passed the Senate, sponsored by Sen. Rodolfo Biazon and cosponsored by Loren Legarda — called the Disaster Risk Reduction Act of 2009.

One has, however, no idea when the House version will be passed.

With regard to better disaster planning, apparently Sen. Gringo Honasan is sponsoring SB 1444 that replaces the present disaster mitigation procedures with one that is not so much focused on response as on prevention.

But our lack of faith in both national and local government, and — dare I say it? — our desire to look out for ourselves first, ignoring the spillover effects (just think of the humongous traffic snarls caused by counterflowers) is something that each of us has to face, and resolve.

We get the government, and the traffic jams, that we deserve.

source: http://blogs.gmanews.tv/winnie-monsod/archives/18-Ondoy-brings-out-the-b...