Tisoy in Yolanda country
I am now in the tenth month of an unexpected and uninterrupted stay in my wife's hometown of Carigara, Leyte. This part of the country is the frontline of almost every Western Pacific-born storm. In those ten months, there had been the usual number of weather disturbances weather bureau PAGASA already anticipated almost to an exact science. Alphabetically sequenced, Tisoy was the 20th.
But Tisoy was different from the previous 19. Tisoy was skirting dangerously close to being a supertyphoon. A supertyphoon, by PAGASA standards, is a tropical cyclone category where the winds are in excess of 220 kilometers per hour. Tisoy packed winds of more or less 190 kph. Tisoy, therefore, scared the shit out of a lot of people here even if this place was not expected to bear the brunt of the storm.
For you do not talk about supertyphoons in this place, or anything approximating one. This place, this region, is Yolanda country. Yolanda, whose international name was Haiyan, was the strongest typhoon in recorded history. With winds way in excess of 250 kph, Yolanda literally wiped out many places in this region off the map in November 2013.
So devastating was that storm that the president at the time, Noynoy Aquino, stopped the official body count at 6,000 and fired a police general who suggested the dead could number more than 10,000. So profound was the effect of Yolanda on people that voters in Tacloban nearly zeroed Noynoy's interior secretary Mar Roxas in the senatorial elections three years later.
Three years were apparently not enough to make people in Tacloban forget how Roxas explained the slow delivery of aid to the ravaged city. Roxas told the Tacloban mayor that he has to understand that he was a Romualdez and that the president was an Aquino. The Romualdezes were cousins to the Marcoses, mortal enemies of the Aquinos.
But more than politics getting into the psyche of people here on account of Yolanda, actual memories of the supertyphoon itself, and the deep scars it left behind, still make people here inordinately nervous about just any other storm. After Yolanda, there is no more going back to the old norm. A people who used to joke about eating typhoons for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, now could no longer countenance the sound of winds on the trees.
This was the palpable feeling of people here as the outer bands of Tisoy began to rattle loose galvanized iron roofings and whistle through cracks in the walls. These normally happy people still managed to smile but one can really sense they were given for appearances than as real indications of ease and confidence. I truly sensed anxiousness, if not downright fear.
As a Cebuano from an island mostly insulated from storms, and as a journalist trained to go by records and standard measurements, I probably would not have appreciated this fear. But I have been here two months after Yolanda, have seen the place still in utter ruins, and I knew why the fear is real. In fact, after Yolanda, it is even more scary. Nobody expected Yolanda. Now everything is measured by it, including, I must say, fear itself.
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