Finding Resty in trail of ‘Yolanda’
When supertyphoon “Yolanda” slammed into the Visayas in Nov. 2013, a small group of intrepid rescuers from Lopez-led Energy Development Corp. (EDC) volunteered to go to Tacloban City.
At that time, EDCwas already in the midst of massive sea, air, and land operations to ferry tons of relief goods— medicines, food, fuel, power generators, among other items—to affected communities in Samar and Leyte.
But members of the small rescue team—half from the company’s geothermal site in Bicol and the other from its geothermal power station in Negros Island—would have a separate and specific mission in Tacloban.
They would search for distressed colleagues, their loved ones—and for missing freshman Resty Arintoc of the University of the Philippines College Tacloban.
Resty hails from Kananga, Leyte, the site of the 701-megawatt Leyte geothermal power station, which in turn is one of EDC’s 12 integrated geothermal power projects in the Philippines.
Acknowledged as one the best students in her high school batch, Resty earlier earned a slot in the College Admission, Review and Readiness (CAREERS), an EDC program to support poor yet deserving students from schools in the company’s host communities. Through CAREERS, Resty received EDC help to review for the UP College Admission Test, which she passed in 2013.
For several days after Yolanda barreled through the Visayas, EDC had no information about Resty’s condition or whereabouts.
They feared for the worst as news of the death toll, massive devastation and breakdown of law and order in Tacloban filtered back to Manila.
Upon the request of EDC people behind CAREERS, the rescuers included Resty in their check list of people to be tracked down and extracted from the devastation in Tacloban.
Soon the rescuers in three discreet vehicles, loaded with relief goods, found all 15 stranded EDC employees and their loved ones in Tacloban.
But Resty for several days remained unaccounted for.
The rescuers found the street of her boarding house but the boarding house itself had vanished. Yolanda simply swept it away. Resty actually survived Yolanda’s wrath and would later recount her harrowing experience when the supertyphoon struck Tacloban in the wee hours of the morning of Nov. 8, 2013.
“I was surprised to wake up from my sleep at 3 a.m. to see the ceiling and roof of our boarding house being torn off by the winds,” recounts Resty. Soon, she was fighting for her life as rising floodwaters swamped their boarding house. She escaped the rampaging waters by clinging to electric wires and crawling through flooded windows to reach higher ground and safety.
After the storm passed, Resty en- dured days of hunger, dehydration, and waiting.
“The next four to five days were the longest I had ever experienced in my life. Communication lines were down, and the city was a scene of complete disaster. I thought no one was coming to rescue us,” Resty recalls.
Notwithstanding the awful situation in Tacloban, the EDC rescuers kept on looking for Resty.
Then they received information that Resty somehow managed to flee Tacloban with a friend to Calbayog City some 150 kilometers to the north in the neighboring province of Samar.
The rescuers from Bicol fetched Resty from Calbayog and brought her, along with the affected EDC employees and relatives, to safety in Sorsogon, where EDC owns and operates the 140MW BacMan geothermal power facility.
In “Yolanda’s” aftermath, Resty received from EDC not only food and shelter but also counseling that CAREERS people facilitated to help her get over her “Yolanda” ordeal.
“We did our best to provide all the support that Resty, our colleagues, and host communities needed to help them rise up after ‘ Yolanda,’” said Allan Barcena, head of EDC’s Community Partnership and Watershed Management-Center of Excellence.
Through CAREERS, Resty completed on time this year from UP Tacloban her Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Science, major in Political Science.
The CAREERS program continues to help its scholars even after graduation by inviting them to attend workshops designed to bolster their confidence and positive outlook in life.
With her confidence getting a boost from the workshop, Resty soon landed a job with a business process outsourcing company in Cebu.
The salary she receives now from the BPO firm helps meet her needs, as well as those of her family in Kananga.
“I felt really blessed that they (EDC rescuers) went out of their way to en sure my safety, even though I was not an employee. They went the extra mile for their scholars,” she gratefully recalls. “Their help was really beyond the usual financial assistance involved in my CAREERS scholarship.”