We need to reconfigure our Yolanda mindset

If there is something to be gained from the ravages of tropical storm Urduja, it is that it left valuable lessons from which everyone concerned can learn when dealing with weather disturbances, especially those that, like Urduja, can behave in a very deceptive manner. Urduja did not pack the wallop of a Yolanda in terms of inherent strength. Neither was it predisposed to hit and run.

Instead it tarried. It dilly-dallied. And while it tarried and dilly-dallied, it unloaded, discharged and otherwise dumped all the rain that it carried. And as usually happens when you pour extraordinary amounts of water on a given place continuously for days, you flood, erode, sweep away, and destroy. Urduja was destructive not because it was destructive but because it took its own sweet inexorable time.

From the Urduja experience comes the need to go back to the drawing boards, yet again, when dealing with storms. Apparently, it was a terrible mistake to make Yolanda and her sheer power the new norm in anticipating weather disturbances. Urduja, with its 70 to 90 kph winds, seemed like pablum to Yolanda's 300 plus kph brute force. Even the satellite red showing its entire rain baggage did not take up much space in its diameter.

In other words, Urduja was largely pooh- poohed, sneered at, and otherwise almost taken for granted. The fact that it took too long to transition from being a low pressure area to tropical depression and then to tropical storm just before it hit land shows that, in the post-Yolanda world, there was little or no sufficient basis to really be concerned about Urduja, at least not in the sense that people should go packing and fleeing away from its path.

In fact, in virtually all of the news reports monitored prior to when Urduja hit land in Samar, all the disaster agencies in the potentially affected areas did was announce their readiness, about how they were primed to respond, and the scope of assets already strategically in place. There was little or no reason to call for mandatory evacuations.

But then you cannot really underestimate the power of water as a destructive force. Without any ominous circulation suggestive of destructive winds, and with satellite images not even showing a solid, all-encompassing red indicative of severe rains, everybody, from the leaders to the led, did not take Urduja with the kind of seriousness that she, on hindsight, truly deserved. But now we know. Now we know we need to reconfigure again the mindset that, at one time, Yolanda set so high.