By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
As I write this, as if I am in the dark. We have yet to hear of our writers from Mountain Province and in Tabuk City, Kalinga. They must still be in the dark, with no cellphone and internet signals. That is, if their cellphones are still working. They might have used up yesterday any power their batteries had. Those places were forecast to experience the storm at Signal No. 4 or 5? So we could imagine how bad it must have been. We who had to go through Signal No. 3 went through a nightmare. Every sound of a GI sheet banging on anything was immediately followed by a prayer that it was not one of ours. Followed by another prayer that if it was of a neighbor, that it won’t hurt anyone.
So we endured more than 12 hours of hearing the wind every second like we were on the outskirts of a race track with the howls of race cars with no mufflers— wooooo-o-o-o-o-o-o! Wo! Wo!. It went on and on.
Whatever we are in now and our lack of contact with our people, we still have to come up with this issue, as we had been doing every weekend the past 20 years.
Some news managed to filter in. Many were scary as that house beside the Chico River in Bontoc, Mountain Province that got toppled into the river. Obviously, its base was scoured by by thrashing water of the river. The water level must have reached unexpected levels.
But even in the direst of moments, there is always a positive side. Just before the typhoon, some senior citizens from Bontoc, Mountain Province came around for us to write about a “slaughter house” established under theSamuki-Bontoc bridge. Their concern was the pollution it was spilling into the river and of course the brazenness of it all. How could a “slaughter house” be tolerated by the powers-that-be in Bontoc? Was it because of money or greed? Or stupidity? Or politics?
And why didn’t the people of Bontoc howl or stage a riot regarding the “slaughter house?”
Luckily, Typhoon Lawin literally made or converted all this or the “slaughter house” into water under the bridge. It was washed away so only water is present there now.
Another point my guests pointed out was the frequent burning of garbage at the new dumpsite of Bontoc. Any pollution caused by burning or other means will contribute to climate change or whatever euphemistic term now being used to refer to it.
So what? Climate change causes strong typhoons like the one that just battered us. The next time around it would be stronger due to burning and other bad activities worldwide. The next time around, a typhoon might not just topple a house and destroy a part of the bridge that spans the Chico River to Samuki barangay from Central Bontoc, as it did this time. There might not be that bridge the morning after a typhoon in the future and many houses might be toppled over. Valuable ricefields which mean life to many might also be washed away. This is not to mention fatalities that could be caused, and God forbid, these won’t be so close to my home or your home.
Let us not kid ourselves that we are over the hump. Even for this year, there will be more. Typhoon Lawin was only the 16th and we get an annual average of 20. So we expect more howlers in the coming weeks. Around four more.
During the year when Typhoon Pepeng struck, causing hundreds of deaths in Little Kibungan in La Trinidad, Benguet, we got around 23 typhoons. But one of the reasons Pepeng was so destructive was it had been continuously raining for about four weeks, thus softening the soil, before it came to pour lots of rain in 24 hours. So many landslides resulted isolating Baguio and other parts of the Cordillera for weeks. It was a record. And the deaths it caused was also a record.
So what is climate change? It can mean so many deaths.
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