PHILIPPINES:
Typhoons getting nastier
MANILA — After several thousand airplane flights I’m seldom surprised by much when flying. But there was an unexpected new twist when I travelled last weekend from Kuala Lumpur to Manila.
About 20 minutes before landing, the Boeing 737 began to get tossed around by high winds as it flew into sheets of torrential rain. The pilot’s voice suddenly came over the intercom to declare that in the event of an emergency evacuation, passengers must leave all their belongings and make their way as quickly as possible to the emergency exits.
We were skirting the southern edge of typhoon Santi, also known as Nari, whose arrival had been predicted for several days on every weather website in Asia. The 19th such tempest to slam the Philippine archipelago this year, Santi had just made landfall about 80 kilometres north of the capital.
With a strong crosswind, the landing was dicey but the drama was over in a minute, with all souls aboard arriving safely.
Typhoons, like their meteorologically identical cousins, cyclones and hurricanes, are not to be trifled with. No part of the world gets more of these lethal storms than the northwestern Pacific basin. On average about 26 typhoons cross the region every year. Of them, about 20 come through the Philippines.
I experienced my first tropical typhoon 35 years ago this month on Manila Bay. Being bumpkins, the Canadian basketball coach Jack Donohue and I gave staff at our hotel a fright by going out for a stroll along a seawall at the height of the storm. The draw for us was a chance to see water shooting a geyser-like 20 or 30 metres into the air after the waves smashed into concrete.
Our walk on the wild side was a foolish thrill. Watching the Canadian team bus as it docked on the stadium steps for practice the next day to avoid metre-deep water was a novel experience, too.
But typhoons, which only get that designation if they pack winds of at least 118 km/h, are never fun for Filipinos. When these colossal storms come howling across the western Pacific, this impoverished, densely populated country is almost defenceless.
Today, as in 1978, Manila has little capacity to deal with the high winds and flash floods that typhoons generate. Many Manilans still live in flimsy shanties built on low ground. Canals that once helped take water back out to sea have been hopelessly choked with garbage for decades. Worse yet, the population of Greater Manila has nearly tripled to 21 million while almost no money has been spent on new infrastructure except for a few mega-highways and mass transit lines that may have made flooding worse.
Tragically for the Philippines, typhoons have become more destructive of late. Five of the 10 deadliest typhoons ever here have occurred in this young century, as have the five costliest typhoons.
Canada has responded by providing $1 million to a little-known, United Nations project completed three months ago designed to “strengthen community resilience to the effects of natural calamities and disasters.” One of the goals was to establish a “people-centred early warning system” in communities in and near Manila. Some of the Canadian funds were also spent to add disaster preparedness to the school curriculum, provide critical-incident stress debriefings after typhoons as well as to provide disaster repair kits for some of the country’s southern islands.
As Canadian academics interested in Asia have advocated, helping the Philippines to better prepare for such catastrophes has the added benefit for Ottawa of demonstrating to the region that Canada is not only interested in trade with the Pacific Rim nations, but in a deeper relationship that includes a commitment to strengthen security in non-traditional ways. The Philippines is a good partner because at the moment it has Asia’s fastest growing economy.
The UN initiative that Canada is part of may help the Philippines cope better with storms such as typhoon Bopha. The storm caused more than $1 billion Cdn in damages last December, according to the Manila-based National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. That $1 billion costs the Philippine economy far more, in relative terms, than it would in Canada.
Designated a super typhoon, Bopha was one of the most ferocious recorded storms to ever hit the Philippines. Packing sustained winds of 280 km/h it came ashore in the south before heading west into the South China Sea. But it boomeranged back one week later, hitting some of the northern islands. Nearly one million Filipinos fled their homes. More than 1,000 of them died, mostly in floods and landslides.
By Philippine standards, last weekend’s typhoon Santi was a squall. It only caused $70 million in damages and 13 deaths. Vehicles manoeuvre though flood waters on a road in the Philippines this month after Typhoon Nari swept across the farming region north of Manila, killing eight people and leaving two million without electricity.
Manila has little capacity to deal with the high winds and flash floods typhoons generate. Many … still live in flimsy shanties built on low ground