One day in the 1990s after rivers of lahar streamed from the slopes of Mount Pinatubo and buried many homes in Pampanga, I was peering through a second-floor window below my eye level. The ground was warm beneath my sneakers as I stooped to look into a bedroom with a double bed and its tousled covers, a crib beside it, stuff on the floor, a bathrobe hanging on a hook behind the door…

But someone came in haste to pull me away and lead me back to the car, warning of snakes, as I, voyeur-like, was committing to memory the details of that steamy late morning in Bacolor (I was on assignment, having managed to convince the Inquirer editor in chief to let me off desk work so I could report on the perils of lahar, which was then just getting into the daily lexicon and well on the way to changing life as the people of Pampanga knew it.) In the car I jotted down notes including how the lahar crunched under my feet; I circled the entombed house in my mind’s eye, chewing on what it implied: that the middle-class family who lived there could never go home again. (Indeed, those displaced lived in evacuation centers for years.)

This memory struck me initially as I viewed footage and photographs of the incredible devastation inflicted by Typhoon “Tino” (internationally known as Kalmaegi) in the Visayas and again as I viewed records of the wind and high water brought by Supertyphoon “Uwan” (Fung-wong) in Luzon. Then and now I thought that the ravaging of hearth and home marks a point of no return: One attempts to rebuild according to one’s resources (the poor having next to nothing) and ultimately realizes there is no conceivable means of getting back, even emotionally, to the original.

Describing the circumstances of what she said was the worst flooding in the history of Cebu, Gov. Pam Baricuatro said “the water rose dramatically in less than 10 minutes” during Tino’s onslaught. One is pushed to imagine the moment and its sharp edges, and the desperate urgency of flight. 

Per the Nov. 11 count, the Tino death toll has risen to 232 (150 in Cebu alone), and 112 are still missing. 

The biting irony was that at Tino’s peak, there was water everywhere—and, hours and days later, none to drink and even to bathe in. On ANC, survivor after survivor begged for help in the clearest terms: They need, not money, but drinking water and water to clean their mud-encrusted homes with, granted their homes are still standing. The living, including those whose dwellings have been reduced to scrap, have a tremendous task on their hands but huge numbers of them, whether post-Tino or post-Uwan, have yet to receive assistance from authorities. Certain critical roads are only now becoming passable and the devastated remote areas have become remoter still. 

Per the Nov. 12 count, 27 persons lost their lives to Uwan and as many as 2.4 million have been displaced.

On TV, post-Uwan situationers make for somber, heart-rending, viewing. In Dinalungan, Aurora, where the daluyong (storm surge) wrecked coastal dwellings, those who escaped with their lives do not quite know where and how to begin to pick up the pieces. The Cordillera is beset by landslides and even more isolated. A lahar flow from Mount Mayon has compounded the general misery in Guinobatan, Albay. The palayan and maisan (rice and corn fields) in Cagayan and Isabela are now shallow lakes, and a farmer dejectedly surveying the ruin muses on the inevitable ritual of going into fresh debt for puhunan (capital) with which to start again…

All this suffering, not unfamiliar in this Land of the Morning but now on a grossly expanded scale, along with the intervening issues of local officials traveling overseas at the height of the record-setting calamities, highlights the backward, feudal, tone-deaf, unscientific, and corruption-wracked state of this country whose people await the results of official inquiries into their having been robbed blind through flood-control and other infra projects.

Impatient Filipinos are viewing the lull in developments in the corruption investigations as approximating the tense interregnum between the House of Representatives’ submission of a verified impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte and the Senate’s effective waffling and eventual successful sidelining of her impeachment trial under the stewardship of then Senate President Chiz Escudero. (Those who made this possible should not be forgotten in the time of reckoning.)

Now, with Congress back in session and Sen. Ping Lacson resuming chairmanship of the blue ribbon committee after a puzzling hiatus, even if he now says its inquiry into the corruption in flood control projects will soon be terminated, the expectation is that the many issues raised by the successive typhoons would also be addressed. Issues such as what the ₱26-billion flood control projects in Cebu in 2022–2025 exactly achieved, and to whose benefit. Or whether the collapse of a portion of Amper Boulevard in Aurora and of assorted dikes and holding walls in various provinces—70 barangays in Pampanga were still flooded as of Nov. 11 (hell, Bulacan towns became a water world even earlier)—is a result of cutting corners for more kickbacks. Or perhaps even why, as disclosed by Ulysis Dylan Gruta, the Duterte administration pronounced Project NOAH “too costly” and cut its funding.

Even bigger public outrage is resulting from the recent calamities, fueling the anger now transforming the demand for accountability from loud to strident. Surely the Independent Commission for Infrastructure (ICI) created by Malacañang can hear. Perhaps it can now come to terms with the call for transparency and figure out the means to livestream its proceedings. And surely lawmakers will now be stirred to bring about a stronger commission that will live up to current needs and expectations. The proposed legislations authored by Mamamayang Liberal Rep. Leila de Lima et al. await action.

It bears asking if the ICI can bring back the recently decamped ex-public works secretary Manuel Bonoan in the event that he is found liable for crimes against the people. Or Zaldy Co, who once chaired the powerful House appropriations committee, and whose lawyer has announced that he has no intention to return.

Meanwhile, the overall public suffering and economic damage inflicted by the back-to-back calamities in the past two weeks alone are unimaginable. Lost lives, lost homes, lost livelihoods: It’s reasonable to expect bigger, angrier, people’s marches on Nov. 30.

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