CAGSAWA AFTER REMING (Published in 2007) by Abdon M. Balde Jr. As a way of remembering Typhoon Reming on November 30, 2006, I am reprinting here the story I published in Philippines Graphic Magazine in 2007, just a few months after the disaster that affected over one million Albayanos, killed nearly 700 residents and caused over 3.2 billion peso damage to properties. . Last Segment: . Later, in Legazpi City, I would see the effects of the devastation still visible almost a month after the storm. Many houses in the city remained roofless, only canvas and plastic covers on damaged rafters. My mouth started to water thinking of kosidong malasugi, we found Cres closed; we walked in the dark for several minutes without finding an open restaurant. Electricity was not restored outside the city, only the major commercial establishments were lighted. We ended up eating chicken in a fastfood resto in LCC. . I would hear stories about nearby places devastated by rampaging lahar as Typhoon Reming was raging. In Guinobatan, the villages of Maipon down to Travesia were swept away by mud and rocks that also flowed from Mayon Volcano, dislocating and drowning thousands of residents. The same calamity happened in the village of Padang, Legazpi. The coastal villages of Santo Domingo were swept to the sea. I heard stories of rivers erased by sand, of silted farms, of ripening grains of rice covered with mud and livestock lost in a matter of minutes. A friend in Guevarra Subdivision in Albay, Mar, and his son Marlon and his grand daughter, were trapped in floodwater that rose to the ceiling of their house and had to dive and forcibly open the main door to get out and for six hours they floated in the cold stream, hugging an upper window sill. In San Roque the family of Dan, including his ailing mother, had to swim over seven feet of flood water to get to a two-story house about a hundred meters away. In Culliat a mother and her daughter were pulled out of a collapsed roof after two days in the mud, the daughter luckily tossed to her mother’s breast was able to survive on her mother’s milk, the mother shell shocked to this day. The father of a family huddled on the roof of a completely flooded house near the Makabalo River fed his children with three packs of uncooked Lucky Me noodles he found floating on water, but for him and his wife there would be no food, no water for forty eight hours. A young girl barely eight years old survived by hugging the branch of a tree for over eight hours; her parents and five siblings were swallowed by the stream and were never found. A young construction worker in the Middle East heard his daughter in the cellphone crying Papa! Papa! Help, we’re flooded! Followed by the firm voice of his wife, telling him not to worry, she will take care of the children, and when he rushed home a few days later, his whole family, his house, everything they owned were gobbled down by the flood. A man was buried in a town cemetery while his pregnant wife had to be kept at a distance, the relatives not wanting her to know they were burying a headless body. Fast decomposing cadavers in Guinobatan and Legazpi had to be covered with lime and buried hurriedly in common graves, to be exhumed a few days later by forensic experts for identification. . Grave thoughts these are on the day innocents were needlessly slaughtered…
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 22:46:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015