MEDIUM RARE
As if the strong winds (the Chinese word for typhoon is “big wind”) were not enough, the rain was intermittent yet persistent, plus it was high tide in Malabon, and then a barge contributed an oil spill to complicate the picture. Floods shallow and deep came along, floods on low land and along coastal areas, floods from a flood of garbage. What your elders taught you must remember: What you throw away will come back to hound you.
If only there were a way to typhoon-proof our islands, so scattered, so vulnerable, so spread out like broken green beads! And yet those 7,100-plus islands are so pretty they could be worn like a necklace on Mother Nature’s robe...
Carina/Gaemi left a swathe of destruction in her wake – alphabet-wise she’s the third typhoon this year — how many more to expect before 2024 bows out? God forbid that we’ll reach letter Z! As far as memory goes, Ondoy in 2009 was high on the list of the most devastating storms, bringing 455 millimeters of rain, compared to Carina’s near 323.9 mm last Wednesday-Thursday. (I felt Carina’s wrath every time a door in the house slammed or a window rattled, but daylight was unusually bright; such that 5:15 p.m. Thursday July 25 felt like 9:30 a.m. How’s that, a seasonal aberration?)
According to Science Garden weather watchers, “Quezon City passed its historical 24-hour accumulation for July on Thursday the 25th.”
Typhoon after typhoon, we haven’t learned our lesson. Floods are caused not by storms, they’re caused by people, hard-headed, unteachable people. Alas, they’re flood-proof, too. I continue to be amazed by the barangay workers and volunteers who dutifully, uncomplainingly show up to clear their streets of garbage left by their obtuse neighbors, who couldn’t be bothered.
There are laws against littering, so how many litterbugs have been arrested, fined, penalized or jailed? Remember when, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, violators of the masking and social-distancing ordinances were punished by shaming them? Some of them were paraded around the neighborhood with signs advertising their crime, others were taken to the cemetery where they were made to stare at the tombstones for hours on end. Time to revive this form of entertainment?