When disaster comes knocking

The clock read 5:23 A.M. It was November 4, and the rain was still barreling down in Barangay Bacayan, Cebu City. My neighbor’s frantic knocks woke me from my sleep, as she desperately asked my parents to allow her family to evacuate to our home. Confused, my brothers took to our third floor and immediately yelled for us to watch --Butuanon River, usually slow and narrow, became a roaring, mud-colored current, pushing against the back of the homes in front of ours.

The irony then was impossible to ignore: there are mountains towering over our subdivision, yet they offered no protection because we had stripped them bare.

Years of deforestation and rapid urbanization had worsened the effects of Tino. Filipinos like to speak of typhoons as if they are sudden intruders, like how Bagyong Tino arrived, tore through the island, and left Cebuanos to fend for themselves. The result may have felt sudden, but it was decades in the making. Last year, Global Forest Watch reported that the province had lost thousands of hectares of tree cover in the past 20 years. Bacayan was even remembered as a barangay covered in deep green, and my parents would often remember seeing more trees than concrete when they passed through numerous places in Cebu.

Subdivisions, quarries, access roads, and skyscrapers now replace forests as people have made land a business opportunity. We see more houses lined in mountain barangays, and roads carved higher into slopes to reach them. We see headlines of luxurious developments made in the name of sustainability, but they have raised significant questions about theirenvironmental impact. Worse, the local government keeps letting this happen. Nature’s response, then, was not random; it was a direct result of the damage we had inflicted. Instead of falling on forests, the storm rained down on exposed land and vulnerable communities, all of which are our own doing.

What is infuriating is how we continue to talk about it as if we do not know what forests do for us. Trees hold soil, break strong winds, and absorb water more efficiently than flood-control projects boasted in ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Still, Cebu continues to chop away its natural defenses, leaving more graveyards of lives and houses, and then calls on preparedness to compensate. While emergency plans, centers, and relief operations can save lives, we could have prevented it if only our mountains were forested, if only our first line of defense were up.

If Cebu wishes to withstand future storms, because we will have them, we must race to restore our forests and enforce strict land-use regulations. We cannot continue to operate with the misconception that we can build without regard for the consequences and still expect nature to protect us. Because when disaster comes, it does not wait for us to be ready. That morning, it may have come knocking on our doors, but if we continue to trim our forests and leave our mountains bare, it won’t just knock --it will come lunging for our lives.

Yza Empleo

Third-year Communication student

University of the Philippines Cebu