Risk

Cagayan accounted for much of the crop damage wrought by Typhoon Ompong. But Benguet accounted for most of the casualties suffered.

There was not much that could be done to save the crops exposed to extreme weather except to prematurely harvest them. That was done to some extent.

There was much that could have been done to save the lives lost due to landslides in Benguet. According to one report, the police tried to evacuate the miners from the ill-fated bunkhouses but they resisted.

Short of evacuating them at gunpoint, which the CHR might have objected to, the police left the vulnerable miners to their eventual fate. Today, rescuers are still trying to dig out the remains of the miners buried by landslides.

DENR Secretary Roy Cimatu responded decisively to this incident. He has banned small-scale mining in the Cordilleras.

Especially in Itogon, Benguet, small-scale mining transformed the mountainsides. All the digging produced a warren of tunnels around that minerals-rich town. Sinkholes have been appearing for years because of this. The murderous landslide that happened during the height of the typhoon’s fury might have been expected.

There is a whale of a difference between large-scale and small-scale mining. The big mines benefit from engineering know-how. They have ample capital to buy equipment and ensure the enforcement of safety codes. They are required by law to undertake remediation after they are done with the land.

Small-scale mining is unregulated. People simply dig holes into the land randomly and abandon them when they are done. No safety codes could be enforced here. No engineering knowledge accompanies this activity.

What happened in Itogon underscores the importance of remediation. This is a redeeming element in our mining law and it must be strongly enforced.

During the debates on the mining law, leftist and populist groups called on government to protect small-scale mining and ban industrial grade mineral extraction. Members of those groups should now be made to dig for cadavers in Itogon – at gunpoint if necessary.

Big data

Dr. Mahar Lagmay, whose expertise we rely on to mitigate calamities, used this occasion to call for the establishment of a full government department to look after our disaster preparedness. Instead of merely relying on historical information, he proposes we use big data to anticipate where calamities may take their toll.

This is an excellent idea. Disaster preparedness is not just about prepositioning equipment and trained responders in place. It is also about assessing the dimensions of risk using powerful mathematical tools. Even calamities have their algorithms.

Heroism and volunteerism are good things to have. But mathematicians have a role to play in mitigating disasters and cutting losses.

Building resilience is a matter of improving the capacity of individuals and communities to bounce back from calamities. Resiliency is much about mitigating financial risks and compensating for damage.

Our insurance industry is strong but small. We need to encourage our insurers to expand coverage of things such as flood and crop insurance.

Without insurance coverage, our farmers are even more vulnerable in the face of storms. If they lose their crop, they do not have the financial means to recover quickly and plant new crops. That vulnerability increases the risks of engaging in agriculture and therefore weakens that sector even more.

It will vastly improve our resilience if we build an insurance culture. Property and crops, when covered by insurance, enables farming communities to bounce back quickly. We cannot rely exclusively on government subsidies to improve our agricultural resilience. Farmers need to appreciate the advantages of paying premiums for insurance coverage.

In the US, where the insurance culture is strong, people easily bounce back from calamities such as forest fires and floods because of insurance payouts. We should build that same culture here.

Better

Even those who are rabidly anti-Duterte will have to concede that the preparations and the responses to Typhoon Ompong was much better than in the past. The only criticism I have heard from the usual nitpicking of anti-Duterte personalities is that we were “over-prepared.”

There is no such thing as being “over-prepared.” It might have been quixotic to expect zero casualties for a weather event with such ferocity and magnitude as Ompong, but that remains a valid goal.

Since we were hit by Ondoy in 2009 and Yolanda in 2013, much effort has been put into our disaster response capabilities. Ondoy caught us completely unprepared. Yolanda was compounded by total mismanagement.

Were it not for the collapse of mining areas in Itogon and the stubbornness of miners who refused evacuation advisories, we might have managed to keep casualties to a minimum. Now we have to keep a keener eye on the remediation of land made porous by past mining activities. There must be a way to make the requirement for remediation retroactive for mining enterprises that dug and left.

Our disaster management is in the hands of professionals and will hopefully continue to be less politicized. Never again should disaster response be used as a platform for politicians seeking to improve their electability.

Disaster management has been institutionalized down to the level of the local governments. There will be no end to improving our capacity in this regard. Global warming assures us weather disturbances can only be more destructive in the future. There is no way we can be “over-prepared.”

We are a nation more prone than most others to natural calamities. We should set the standard for preparedness.