From times past to times present, calamity stories never change
Credit to Author: Marlen V. Ronquillo| Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2020 17:19:43 +0000
Some stories never change. For example, the stories of June 16, 1991 and the stories of Jan. 12, 2020.
The second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century, the Mount Pinatubo eruption, was on Jan. 15, 1991. In terms of the volume of volcanic mineral and toxic metals unleashed, it was the century’s largest. No volcanic eruption has sent that massive volume of particulate into the stratosphere, according to records, since the Mount Krakatoa eruption in 1883.
The June 15 fury, recorded at Explosivity Index 6, sent tons of volcanic debris from Pinatubo’s caldera. Onto roofs of houses, commercial buildings and churches, into standing crops, into the river systems, into roads, into animal barns, into anything beyond a 40-kilometer radius. The skies darkened and the ground shook relentlessly from the impact of the massive eruption. Worse, and this compounded the woes to the affected areas, massive rains heightened the load of the falling volcanic debris.
The Pinatubo eruption upended global aviation.
At 3:00 p.m. on eruption day, with zero visibility except for truck headlights, I sent off the last truck that did the emergency hauling of broilers at the farm. At 5 p.m., just two hours after the last truck was off, all the 11 buildings with a capacity of 65,000 broilers collapsed due to the sheer weight of the sand and ash that piled up on the roofs. At about the same time, as total darkness, fear and desperation overcame the whole community where I farmed and lived, the collective urge was to evacuate. We were just about 32 kilometers from the caldera. Overwhelmed by fear, I did not even have the time to reflect on the fact that everything that I had built was gone.
But this dawned on all of us: Where? We were willing to walk in the driving rain and the pouring sand and ash and move to safe ground. But where would the darkness take all of us?
So, on the early morning of June 16, as slats of light broke into a night of utter terror, thousands of us followed what was left of the muddied road into the general direction of what is now the City of San Fernando, Pampanga’s capital. Into the eastern towns near another volcano,Mount Arayat, which were not really safe but definitely safer than being near Pinatubo’s furious caldera.
The group that I led finally settled at one of the churches near Mount Arayat. The parish priest, Among Marlon Cunanan, was a boyhood friend, one who would always give roof to those who needed shelter.
In times of calamities, especially in times of extreme, once-in-a-lifetime calamity, you are on your own. You flee from the disaster area with nothing but clothes on your back, perhaps a wallet with a few useless pesos and what people invoke most often during moment of extreme desperation and fear: the capacity to seek help from the heavens and pray. Like you have never prayed before.
On Jan. 12, 2020, well into the second decade of the 21st century, the newspaper headline stirred into us, those who fled the fury of the Mount Pinatubo eruption, a sense of déjà vu. The headlined screamed, “People evacuated on their own.”
The 2020 Taal explosions might have been pyrotechnics compared with the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo. But the hellish and nightmarish sense was just the same — ashes of gloom and doom, the rumbling earth, the cracks, the dark skies — the foreboding of a really violent and destructive eruption. All of those things pushed the people in the communities in and around Taal into a sense of panic. Hence, the urge to flee to safer grounds. After all, the communities that people abandon after or during an eruption have this commonality: they all look like ghost towns.
And, their evacuation, just like the movement of people away from Pinatubo in 1991, was done outside the ambit of a political entity, a governing structure or a figure of authority. Grief-stricken people always move on their own without the help of government.
Nothing has changed. From time past to time present, this is what people have been doing.
In the several hours after a calamitous event, the government is as clueless as citizens on what to do. Do you have this iconic image of George W, Bush, wrapped in an aura bordering on cluelessness, upon being informed of 9/11?
Can’t the government learn from history and ready the succor mechanisms and structures
after a great calamity? We don’t know. We Filipinos have no institutional memory of a capable and competent government that is prepared to respond adequately and competently to major calamities, whether these are volcanic eruptions of the century, or typhoons of the century. I don’t think that day, a prepared government, will even come.
More, after the Taal explosions, there was conscienceless profiteering. After the Pinatubo eruption, infrastructure rebuilding was marked by official corruption of a mind-boggling scale. I distinctly remember this. The late senator Ernesto Maceda coined the phrase “ grandmother of all scams “ in reference to a major Pinatubo infrastructure project.
From times past to times present, our stories never change.