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You can take out your garbage while the truck is here.
Please make way for the payloader.
Metro Manila Development Authority Chairman Bayani Fernando
is no stranger to cleaning and clearing operations.
But nothing prepared him for what he had to deal with
after Typhoon Ketsana soaked the Philippines on September 26.
This is the first time in my entire life
that something like this has ever happened in Manila.
Typhoon Ketsana dumped one month's worth of rain in Manila
and the nearby regions in just nine hours.
The deluge left at least 280 fatalities,
more than 680,000 people packed in 700 evacuation centers,
and over U.S.$100 million worth of damages to infrastructure and agriculture.
To date, 2 million Filipinos have already been affected.
At around 9:10 a.m. in the morning,
I heard a loud roar, and then there were rocks
that went with big waves. It was really big!
I ran to the house immediately and shouted to my children,
"We're going to die here!
It's the end of the world!"
Prestin lives right beside a creek and a quarry site.
Rampaging waters of Ketsana swept away his house.
But Ketsana did not spare even those who live in gated middle-class subdivisions,
which had never been flooded in the past.
At 6 p.m., we decided to evacuate to my neighbor's house
because floodwaters were really rising.
So you see, my bedroom is located over there
and we have a fire escape there.
So even if the opening was small,
we did everything to get out from there.
We went to our neighbor's house
and climbed a narrow ledge.
So we did that while it was dark and raining.
Cars were floating. The dogs' cages were floating.
We couldn't see our gates anymore.
And then outside the street,
we saw trucks passing. We saw tables passing, furniture passing.
[The water rose up to here.]
Ana's mother, Corazon, plans to move out of their place
where she has lived for more than 40 years.
The important thing is, we are all alive.
It taught me not to value material things.
And material things can be easily replaced.
Let's not dwell on what happened.
Let's just laugh about it and charge it to experience.
Metro Manila Development Authority's Fernando says
the cleanup operations in the metropolis
will take at least two months.
Everyone's at fault.
And I'm telling you now, yes. I am the first one to blame.
So all of us will realize and
accept that what happened was our responsibility.
Fernando blames the massive flooding
to the clogging of waterways and drainage systems.
The lesson here is all about greed.
We build houses in places where we're not supposed to.
We have houses in place but we extend until our creeks become small or are gone.
We throw our garbage anywhere!
Everything that we do has something to do with the flashfloods.
This happened because there is no political will.
Our leaders are afraid to enforce the law,
because the people are angry at those who implement the law.
The heavy rains of Ketsana in metro Manila
were more than the amount of downpour of Hurricane Katrina,
which devastated New Orleans in 2005.
But while the flooding in the country is being attributed
to the clogging of waterways,
the deluge in New Orleans was aggravated
because the levees broke.
Floods are not rare occurrences in the Philippines,
which is visited by an average of 20 typhoons every year.
But the fury of Ketsana caught everyone by surprise,
including the authorities.
This kind of magnitude in metro Manila
was seen for the first time.
It was just signal number one.
Activities will not stop when you have signal number one.
National Disaster Coordinating Council Spokesperson Anthony Golez,
who is also deputy spokesperson of the presidential palace,
attributes the massive flooding to the saturation of the soil.
We had three typhoons [this year].
The fourth is Ondoy [Ketsana].
The three typhoons hit the same path,
making our soil super-saturated,
which means that the absorptive capacity of our soil
has reached its maximum.
He admits that while the government had a disaster preparedness plan in place,
it was overwhelmed by the devastation caused by Ketsana.
Our systems were overworked.
We tried preparing. I would always say,
we are always trying to prepare communities.
There has to be a shared responsibility among stakeholders.
Everybody must have this shared responsibility concept
so that, that is the only time we can say
we are more prepared now than yesterday.
[Number of casualties ...]
Every year, the government appropriates more than U.S.$40 million
in the national budget to address calamities.
The Philippines has already appealed to the international community for help,
as funds needed to cope with the disaster that was Ketsana
are simply not enough.
We need a bigger, bigger calamity fund
just to meet the basic requirements.
Extreme weather conditions have been observed in the Philippines in the past two years,
prompting some government officials to attribute the rains of Ketsana
to climate change.
[Ketsana was not strong at all.]
Dr. Rosa Perez, one of the country's climate change experts,
says more research is needed to confirm that.
But if Ketsana were a consequence of climate change,
Perez says that the Philippines,
a disaster prone area,
can only expect more frequent and intense extreme events.
She notes that the country's public storm-warning system
is limited to forecasting the intensity of the wind
and not the amount of rainfall to be expected in specific areas.
If you have the so-called Doppler radar, it can follow
the life cycle of the cloud
and follow where it is going.
[That's what we don't have?]
Then you can predict the amount of rain and the area where it will fall.
[The latest weather update ...]
PAGASA, the country's weather bureau,
requested the purchase of Doppler radars five years ago.
Lack of funds delayed the procurement of the much-needed equipment,
which was first used in other countries more than 20 years ago.
A Doppler radar costs U.S.$1.6 million.
Perez says metro Manila needs no less than two Doppler radars.
There should be at least two in the metropolis.
A radar can't monitor everything,
so you need another one that will just focus on the blind spots.
PAGASA says one such radar will be in place by December of this year.
If only the radars were in place,
the damage wrought by Ketsana, particularly the loss of lives,
could have been minimized,
if not prevented.