Stories I Heard
by Michael Abarro
It would be best to think that our government had already made preparations to prevent Typhoon Yolanda from happening beforehand. We probably have, in the strictest sense of the word ‘have’. Our government had probably said “We have done X, to prevent Y from happening,” but seriously, IT HAPPENED. Almost every plan fell through, almost every contingency failed; almost every preparation made was not enough. According to the NDRRMC we had estimated 6,000 people dead and dying clogged up in the roads at places like Tacloban. We’ve probably come a long ways from that now, and it would have been best if we had more preparations to prevent the typhoon from impacting us as it had.
When my cousin told me of what he knew about what was happening on the ground in Leyte back in December, I was disappointed. I was told of slow efforts, bad cohesion between the government agencies, and in-fighting between everyone in charge. He told me stories about how our President was getting flak on CNN because of slow relief efforts, and this other story that struck me as weird, about how the government attributed Tacloban’s near-fall into anarchy due to local police not reporting for work during the disaster. Well, what did they expect?! That the cops would come to work, when they’re still busy shoveling the remains of their houses for family and friends?
They were just stories, with no basis and no facts, but it made me feel bad about what our government did. So I checked their facts out. When I found out the truth, I was like “Dude, what the f***?” Amanpour was asking PNOY simple questions like “How do you manage to reassure your people?” Our President replied, “The government’s initial response was reassuring to the vast majority of our people...”, and at the same time I watched Cooper at Tacloban Airport where hundreds were sleeping there because they had no other place to go to. How is “hundreds of people” sleeping in a derelict airport because there was nothing else “reassuring”?
And the story about the Tacloban Cops not reporting for work, I found a curious one from the Inquirer about this one cop who “hung to the wires and cables of street posts to survive” for thirty minutes while looking at the storm surges wiping Tacloban off the map with a deluge of debris and dead bodies, and then had to go to Quezon City to reported to the PNP office to prove he was not dead. This guy’s story was worthy of a tragedy/drama Stephen Spielberg movie, and yet he was one of the Tacloban cops who “did not report for work”.
Sure let’s give the government and our country some slack. It’s hard to run a country with 7,000 plus islands, and it’s even harder to reconstruct it from a 315-kilometer-per-hour Typhoon. But let’s get real with the situation. During his Amanpour interview, PNOY mentioned only minimal casualties in some areas due to our efforts, which is easy to say if anyone important to you wasn’t one of those casualties. The Tacloban Cops were just people who had to put their families first before thankless duties nobody else cared about. Let’s get real, people. Typhoons are hard, but we could’ve done more.
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