Death Toll in the Typhoon

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This past weekend somewhere around 500 hundred people drown when a ferry capsized during a typhoon. If you count all of the other people who died in the typhoon then the number rises to about 600. In one weekend in the Philippines 600 people died. That is equivalent to about 12 people an hour. That is horrifying

Almost all of these deaths were in Visayas and on the coastal region of Manila. I have not yet visited Visayas, and so when I heard about the deaths I automatically did the most natural thing, I thought to myself how big a shame it was but accepted without question what the government and the media was saying, because I had no personal point of reference in the situation. The coast guard trying to save people possibly still alive in the overturned ferry, the continued bad weather causing delays in the abundance of food and medical relief that the government was sending...

But then I came to work on Monday and opened up the paper to pictures of the destruction in Manila and realized that I in fact do have a personal point of reference. When the media says "destruction along the coastal region of Manila" what they actually mean is the destruction of squatter communities along Manila Bay. One of those squatter communities is the community I lived for my urban poor exposure in Manila. That's when I started asking my co-workers some questions.

Though the media never says it, it is common knowledge here that when communities are destroyed and people die in natural disasters it is the poorest communities, the squatter communities, the peasant communities, where people were not able to build houses strong enough to withstand the storm, where people die. We are never told that at home when we hear about natural disasters in other countries. Maybe we should assume, but how can we when we have never experienced typhoons or volcano eruptions or monsoons ourselves. Living in Canada I always assumed that there exotic natural disasters were just too powerful and destructive for humans and human construction to withstand. But then, Filipinos think that winter sounds to horrifying and unforgiving for human beings to withstand.

I experienced my first typhoon here about a month and a half ago and I realized then that a typhoon is just exactly like a blizzard. It rains for days strait, sometimes in drizzel, sometimes in torrents, but constantly. And it rains in all directions, the wind commands its movement while it falls and after it has hit the ground. Water pools heavily in one area and then like a snow drift is pushed without warning to another. So I got to thinking, why don't 600 Canadians die every blizzard? But the answer to that is simple, we are prepared, we have lived with blizzards our whole lives and so we know as a population how to mitigate the damages. If you think about it, though we think typhoons and the like are dangerous and frightening, Canada has some pretty wild weather conditions itself. They just don't scare us because there are mechanism in place to deal with them. In Labrador the weather drops to -60 degrees on a regular basis in the winter and people still go about their lives because we have been taught how to dress warm enough to protect our skin from frost bite. In water ways all over the country boats still operate when the ice chucks are heavy enough to crush their hulls, because the crew has been taught how to navigate the ice and because we have created specialized vessels to break it up for them in advance. Almost without fail our houses aren't destroyed by the strong winds, our water pipes don't freeze, our population doesn't freeze and out infrastructure doesn't buckle. And when out infrastructure does buckle, when we don't have enough show plows, when our electricity goes out, when our road are eroded the problem is solved as quickly as possible. We are prepared and we survive our dangerous weather. Filipinos have been facing typhoons for as long as Canadians have been facing blizzards, why are they no prepared, why don't they have plans in place to mitigate the damages?

The answer to that question is also simple: the government. It gets tiring here to always blame the Government of the Philippines, but it the shoe fits, and in this case the shoe sure does fit. The people are not properly warned about typhoons, or only those directly in the storms path are warned, despite the fact that all of the surrounding islands are typically effected with heavy waves and that the storms often go off course. No building codes are enforced to assure that all houses are strong enough to withstand the storm. And the government ignores the gigantic squatter population, approximately 33 million in the whole country, (yes, approximately the size of the whole Canadian population) whose construction materials are sometimes concrete, but more often tarps, old signs, scraps of metal and scraps of wood strung together with a combination of nails, straw cord and heavy rocks. There is no effort made to help these people get real houses that will withstand the storms. No research has been done to catalogue the numerous flood planes and no there has been no effort to relocate the people who live in them, or to set up dikes, or to reconstruct the houses in a way that will protect them from flood damage. No safeguards are in place to keep people from living along waterways which become dangerous in typhoon season, or to keep people away from the beaches during storms. The government does not sand bag in advance of typhoons or set up adequate evacuation centers. It also does not often help people rebuild after a natural disaster. And if the government does pledge money for research, preparation, protection, relief and reconstruction it can be assumed that at least half of that money, if not more, will be lost to corruption before it even reaches the effected area. Corruption is so rampant in the system here that it is assumed that every politician and public servant is skims money from the allocation before it reaches the people and so I have not met anyone who actually relies on money promised by the government.

And so then the people also know that natural disasters come every year, why don't they protect themselves? That is a logical question, and one I asked myself the last time there was a typhoon in Baguio. My apartment building is made out of concrete, it has strong doors and strong windows and it is build high so that it doesn't flood. Why don't all Filipinos take such precautions to protect themselves. But the answer to that is, sadly, simple too, they don't have the resources. The Filipinos with money have protected themselves against typhoons. It is the ones who, as it is, can only afford to live in a house made out of banana crates and last election's campaign signs, all of which they found in the garbage dump, who are the ones dying in typhoons. They can't afford to fortify their own houses against the driving wind and rain. All they can afford to do during a typhoon is pray that God or the Government will finally take pity on them and keep them safe. If a government doesn't want to have to take on protecting its citizens from natural disasters then it needs to make sure that they can afford to protect themselves. If only the Government of the Philippines would stop allowing big corporations to hire people on a contractual basis and pay people well below the regulated minimum wage, but instead enforce the Philippine labor laws which demand that all workers get a fair and living wage and that they have job stability, with proper benefits, then people would be able to protect themselves.

Human beings have been facing the harsh weather conditions of our individual environments for a long time. Why are people still dying? We can and should have discovered ways to protect our citizens from the dangerous things nature throws at us every year. The country's with resources have already started to do that. It is the governments who are not putting resources into protecting their populations from typhoons, and volcano eruptions and monsoons, ect who are to blame when their people die in natural disasters. The Government of the Philippines is responsible for the 600 deaths last weekend, because they did absolutely nothing to attempt to mitigate the damages to their own people.

Images in the News:

Finding your own method of evacuation: http://images.google.com.ph/imgres?imgurl=http://cache.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2008/06/21/1214091346_5840/539w.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/articles/2008/06/22/typhoon_sweeps_through_philippines_claiming_at_least_21&h=305&w=539&sz=40&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=ADFDH_FXDWa-DM:&tbnh=75&tbnw=132&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dphoto%2Btyphoon%2Bin%2Bthe%2Bphilippines%26gbv%3D2%26ndsp%3D20%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN
House destroyed in the countryside:
http://www.nancarrow-webdesk.com/warehouse/storage2/2007-w47/img.78252_t.jpg
Flooding in the urban poor communities:
http://graphics.boston.com/resize/bonzai-fba/AP_Photo/2008/06/23/1214207994_0266/539w.jpg

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Comments

[Edward E.]

God Save Us!
You are absolutely right. This government and all previous governments of the Philippines failed to address the grave housing problem in the country. The very few housing projects that were built by the government are barely affordable to the average wage earners. If the money was spent for housing instead of giving out those billions of pesos they call pork barrel to the "honorable lawmakers" of the Philippine legislature for their own "projects", very decent housing woud have been freely available all over the country. A lot of politicians are corrupt and so are the bureaucrats. It's so difficult to open a business in the Philippines because of too much red tape. This red tape is usually the cause of corruption. And I just wonder what kind of corruption goes on with all the paper work needed for sea travel. It seems that people's prayers were not enough, or those prayers might have been addressed to the wrong Entity, or those prayers have not been heeded at all. I hope God is not angry.

[H U N T E R]

really..
i totally agree with what you said because its just how things work in the philippines. people are just tired of blaming the government because everything just fallen to deaf ears, nobody's listens. the philippines is a such a beautiful and wonderful country and yet its like a piece of hell. we can't blame these people to feel hopeless in the midst of wide-spread corruption, political instability, surging price commodities, rising oil prices, unemployment, diseases, natural calamities, etc. all contributing to worsening filipino lives. many believe there's no hope in the philippines already, ad if the govt still blinds itself into the state of the nation and with all of these man-made and natural calamities becoming unpredictable and inevitable, there will soon come a time where everything doesn't exist in the philippines..