Yolanda’s Lessons

As we look forward to 2015, we might ask ourselves: what have we learned from natural disasters in recent years? Are we still stuck with “Oplan No Plan,”as one UP artist once sardonically put it, or are we moving toward better anticipation of natural disasters and more effective follow-through in our relief efforts?

Tropical storm “Seniang” (Jangmi) swirled slowly out of the country on New Year’s Eve, after heavy rains had sparked landslides and flashfloods in the Visayas and Mindanao, leaving behind a death toll of at least 59. That tropical depression was just one of many storms the archipelago witnesses every year. The worst in recent years, of course, had been typhoon “Yolanda” (Haiyan) — the most powerful storm to make landfall in recorded history, costing 6,300 lives and affecting almost 1.5 million families.

In the course of dealing with a typhoon of Yolanda’s scale, government agencies such as the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) learned a number of invaluable lessons. These, in turn, informed the responses to typhoons “Ruby” (Hagupit) and Seniang. In the last two cases, casualties were dramatically lower, although, with zero casualties, the response to Ruby was far more impressive. It would seem that the fact that Seniang had only begun as Signal No. 1 may have blindsided local and national authorities to the possibility of potentially devastating landslides, which explains the number of subsequent fatalities. Still, there is little doubt that government response has significantly improved since Yolanda.

The first lesson learned: the need to distribute relief goods even before calamities hit. Given the archipelagic nature of our country, this becomes necessary to meet the challenge of handling and transporting relief goods, especially since transportation routes are often destroyed, blocked by debris or hampered by continuing foul weather.

Second: having a self-contained quick-response team ready to take action from the very day the disaster is expected to make landfall. Clearly, relying solely on the ability of local actors to respond to disasters is insufficient. In large-scale calamities such as Yolanda, local responders themselves are potential victims. There needs to be a national team in place to support our local governments.

Third, is the prepositioning of goods in safer areas. When DSWD teams landed in Tacloban the day after Yolanda, they discovered that many of the local government’s — and even the regional office’s — prepositioned goods had been washed out by the storm surge. This demonstrated the need to find safer areas for storing equipment and goods. They have since partnered with the World Food Programme and others to establish a national network of disaster response facilities. This includes optimizing supply-chain systems in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao as prepositioning locations for relief equipment, goods and trained staff.

A fourth lesson — and one that remains a work in progress — is the need for better evacuation centers. At present, the majority of DSWD’s evacuation centers are schools, covered courts and public buildings — facilities that need retrofitting and improvements to withstand large-scale disasters. Given the increasing frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones in the Philippines, we certainly need safe evacuation centers that are specifically constructed for this purpose.

A variety of communications issues provide the fifth lesson. Doubt and chaos are an almost certain consequence of communication shut downs. Whether among survivors, relief responders, or the public as a whole, a simple lack of communications — or even hampered communications — invites both fear and anxiety. The goal is to establish alternative ways of communicating, especially in situations that threaten communication infrastructures with severe damage. Also, the Yolanda experience taught the importance of “layman-izing” forecasting and other necessary information so that the information can be easily understood (the phrase “storm surge” needed to be vernacularized, for example) and acted upon by the public immediately.

Finally, evacuations were much easier to enforce because at-risk populations were much more willing to cooperate in the aftermath of Yolanda. For instance, some 227,000 families – more than a million people – were successfully evacuated ahead of Ruby’s arrival.

General improvements in the aftermath of Ruby provide an indication that agencies, at-risk populations and the general public as a whole have learned a few lessons from Yolanda. Combined with more careful forecasting by PAGASA, these hard-learned lessons have enabled the public to be better prepared the next time around. Days before the landfall, stockpiles of relief goods were placed in areas along the path of the storm, so local governments could repack them for immediate distribution to their constituents. Quick response teams were also deployed to operation centers in these same areas, to coordinate with local governments for whatever support, assessment or evacuation help they might need.

Since Yolanda, government agencies have come to understand that the frequency and scale at which we experience disasters now defines our “New Normal.” Even so, as the difference in death tolls between Seniang and Ruby indicates, the word “normal” must not be allowed to encourage us to be complacent in the future. Even if the national government retains and improves disaster response, at-risk local governments, their populace and the general public must all keep today’s new threat levels in mind.

Coming to terms with the profound consequences of climate change, whose impact falls disproportionately on countries like the Philippines, requires that the very ways in which we approach the problems of governance must incorporate lessons from mistakes made in dealing with the calamitous consequences of storms and flashfloods. The ongoing task: to institutionalize these many lessons. This means finding effective ways of disseminating this hard-won knowledge so the process of disaster response becomes second nature not only for government agencies, but to ordinary people who live in areas most likely to be affected by natural calamities – tragically, a regular occurrence in this day and age.