October
2006
Typhoon
October was an exciting month, at least from the perspective on
one interested in natural disasters. At the end of September,
typhoon "Milenyo" (in quotes because that's the Filipino name for it,
not the international name) crossed Luzon. I later read that
the
eye passed somewhere over Metro Manila. On September 27, it
rained heavily and parts of the UPLB campus were without electricity.
I was doing some research in the main campus library, which
does
not have a generator or air conditioning. I had enough light
by
an open window to read articles, though I sometimes had to close the
window so rain wouldn't blow in. On September 28, I traveled
to
Manila for a Fulbright end-of-grant presentation. In
hindsight it
was probably an extremely stupid thing to do, but attending
presentations is part of my contract and although it was windy and
raining hard at 6 a.m., there was only a bit of flooding by Jollibee
and no trees had broken yet. So I got on the bus and had an
uneventful trip up to Manila, until the bus tried to exit the tollway.
I had been worried that I'd get to the PAEF office before
they
opened, but more than an hour passed as we were stuck in a traffic jam
caused by flooding. Things didn't improve once I caught a
city
bus on Buendia (Gil. Puyat) Ave. Part of Buendia was closed
in
the other direction because of flooding. I was an hour late
arriving at the Fulbright office, but in true Filipino fashion, the
presentation hadn't started yet, so I didn't miss anything. I
had
planned to ride to Manila with another Fulbrighter who is also based in
Los Baños, but he caught a later bus, got off at a different
stop, took the MRT, and arrived at the office well before I did.
One of these days I'm going to find out where he gets off the
bus
- traffic is generally bad after the bus exits the tollway.
I had the foresight to bring my flashlight with me, and the presenter
actually used it a few times during his talk when the power in the
Ayala Life FGU building went off briefly. I think they have
generators, but there were a number of brownouts, one just before I
took the elevator up to the 10th floor (I considered taking the
stairs), and several longer ones during the presentation.
Fortunately the speaker had printed out the articles that he
wrote for the presentation, so he wasn't dependent on the laptop and
projector, though he used them at the end of his talk. I
stayed
in the Fulbright office for the rest of the day, and watched with the
staff as a piece of roof flashing on the building outside the window
flipped back and forth before finally tearing off (apparently it landed
on a car below). We could feel the air pushing in around the
window seals, and around noon the typhoon was at its strongest, with
sheets of water whipping past the windows. I worked on
modifying
photos and writing webpages until the office closed at 4 p.m., and
during that time I didn't lose electricity or my internet connection.
One of the staff had called to reserve a room for me at
Gilarmi
Apartments, a hotel/apartment complex on Ayala Ave., as it was apparent
that I wouldn't be able to get back to Los Baños that night,
and
there was another presentation scheduled for the next day. I
had
been hoping to stay with the woman who was to present, but she had to
finish her talk and submit a grant application, so I stayed at the
Gilarmi.
It had stopped raining by the time I left the PAEF office at 4 p.m.
I tried going to my bank to withdraw cash to pay for my hotel
room, but there was no electricity on Buendia Ave. Even in
Makati
City, I saw plenty of evidence of destruction. Every tree I
passed had been uprooted or had broken branches. A parking
garage
had lost a large area of its stuccoed concrete facade, which had
crashed onto the sidewalk and street. The underpasses on
Ayala
Ave. were without electricity (once again I was glad to have my
flashlight), and at least one was flooded. I returned to the
Ayala Life building to use a working ATM there and then walked to
Gilarmi. At one point I took off my leather sandals (though
they
were already wet), put on my house slippers (aka flip-flops), and
rolled up my pant legs to wade through a flooded area. The
Gilarmi had electricity, and cable, so I checked in and made my way
over to Landmark (a shopping mall) for dinner and some shopping.
I bought some clothes and two pairs of slippers, one for
indoor
and one for outdoor, because I was still borrowing indoor slippers from
Greg (but had just used them for puddle-wading). I had dinner
at
Chowking in the basement food court, where the choices were noodles or
dim sum. I went with the noodles and got a bottle of water at
the
supermarket in the basement. Landmark was open, but I think
they
were running on generators because the back rooms of the department
store didn't seem to be lit. A lot of people were at the
shopping
malls in that area, probably because they didn't have electricity at
home. I avoided the huge line for taxis, walked back to the
Gilarmi, watched some TV and learned that the other Fulbright
presentation had been postponed, and went to bed.
September 29 was bright and sunny, all the better to see the
destruction. Buendia Ave. was no longer flooded, but I waited
for
an hour at the Taft Ave. LRT bus station with no bus.
Eventually
some enterprising men across the street started yelling "Santa Cruz"
and after a bit of hesitation I went over to see what they had.
They had FX vans, which are maybe supposed to be 12 passenger
but
16 people fit into the one I took to Los Baños. It
cost
P120, which wasn't too much more than the P87 for the bus, and I knew
I'd get home more quickly in the van. I sat in the very back
left
corner and felt a bit like a sardine, with my knees hitting the seat in
front of me and bumping shoulders with the man on my right.
For
the first part of the trip I didn't pay too much attention to that,
though - I was horrified by the destruction I saw instead.
All
along the highway, trees were broken or uprooted. In some
areas
every planted tree was blown over. The banana trees were
mostly
snapped off or torn to shreds, though the ones that weren't broken put
out new leaves in a matter of days. I saw eight giant
billboards
that had collapsed onto buildings or roads. The billboards
here
are huge metal scaffoldings with printed tarps stretched over them.
Only two tarps were still intact - the rest had been ripped
to
shreds. All the streams we passed had obviously flooded over
their banks and showed severe signs of erosion. In Calamba I
saw
several houses that were hanging over air where the flooding had
scoured away the river bank. It took a long time to get
through
Calamba. Every low spot was still flooded, and a few times I
wasn't sure that the FX was going to make it through the brown, oil-
and diesel-streaked knee-deep water. Stalled buses, Jeepneys,
and
cars clogged the roads, and where there wasn't water, there was mud, in
some cases 6 inches deep or more. I saw people shoveling out
their houses, pulling their ruined furniture out to dry, and filling
buckets with muddy water to wash out the mud in their houses.
They were the lucky ones - they still had their houses, and
the
water had receded enough so they could go inside. On my last
trip
to Manila, on October 19, they had ripped up the sidewalks in Calamba
to shovel the mud out of the street drainage systems. Front
end
loaders were scooping the piles of mud into trucks.
Los Baños looked good by comparison, and although my street
had
downed power lines and some mud covering the concrete, I was surprised
to learn that the house had flooded with knee-deep water.
There
was no flood warning because the electricity was out and the water rose
quickly, but Con and Olan managed to move the rice keeper and the
upholstered furniture to the second floor. By the time I got
home, the floor was spotless and I couldn't tell that the house had
flooded, though the backyard was filled with mud.
Unfortunately
Olan's car also flooded, and it was a month and a half before it was
repaired enough to run. We had water but no electricity for a
week and a half. Having water was great - it meant that we
could clean and do laundry and take baths, but not having electricity
got old pretty fast. We had no TV or radio, which was ok, but
it was much harder having no electric fans, refrigerator, or lights.
Dinner was a candlelight affair every night and we went to
bed early, but every morning there was wax to scrape off the floor and
the price of candles went up, in premature anticipation of All Souls'
Day.
My room is on the second floor, so I didn't have anything that was
damaged in the flood. Other family members weren't so lucky
and they ended up throwing out many bags of ruined things. I
ended up feeling bored and useless for much of the week after the flood
- I couldn't sort through other people's belongings, and no one wanted
to let me help clean. One day I insisted on helping Con with
the laundry, and we did eight loads' worth - by hand. The
next day all the skin on my hands started peeling off. Food
also became boring - with no refrigeration, the markets only had a few
kinds of fish (we ate a lot of tilapia) and with no freezer, we
couldn't buy and keep the kinds of meat and fish that Grace would
normally buy at the Saturday market.
Eventually, though, the electricity came back on, and the mud on the
road dried up. The Los Baños campus suffered a lot
of damage, with many large trees that came down, some on buildings.
I went up to Forestry when the roads were still a single lane
in some places. The pictures below don't come close to
conveying
the amount of damage done by the typhoon. Note the downed
lines
held up by branches in front of the entrance to Makiling Botanic Garden.
The electricity took a lot longer to come back on at Forestry because
in addition to removing all the downed trees, utility workers also had
to replace a number of poles that had snapped. The
replacement
poles were all concrete, which means they'll be less like to be eaten
out by termites and then snap in a strong wind. The basement
of
the Forestry building flooded a bit from water that was moving down the
hillside, but as far as I know no real damage was done. The
same
can't be said for the Plant Genetics building down by IRRI.
The
building is located between two creeks in a low-lying area, and there
was so much water that equipment was washed out of the building.
Researchers there have lost years of work and millions of
dollars
worth of equipment. At Forestry, the biggest loss seems to
have
been the internet server. More than a month after the
typhoon,
there still wasn't any internet connection available in Forestry, and
who knows when the server will be restored or replaced.
With time, the scars left by Milenyo have become less apparent.
Most of the finer debris that was blown down by the typhoon
has
been burned, resulting in nights where the smoke was so thick it
resembled fog. Many of the trees that looked skeletal because
most of their leaves had blown off have regrown new leaves, and by next
year it will be difficult to tell where branches were lost.
Of
course, in areas where every tree was blown over, it will take much
longer for the damage to fade. The geological damage done by
Milenyo is not likely to fade. Despite being a forest
reserve,
Mt. Makiling is home to a number of villages. A landslide on
one
side of the mountain killed several people, and geologists have since
declared the entire mountain unsafe for human habitation. The
risk of additional landslides is apparently too great. I was
surprised to read this in the paper - I thought that Mt. Makiling still
had enough forest to make it less vulnerable to landslides.
But
of course I've seen first hand how logging and slash-and-burn
agriculture continue even in areas that are supposed to be protected,
and the University is fighting a losing battle against people who
degrade the land in their effort to make a living. And even
though the villagers have been ordered to leave the mountain, many will
remain and continue the very activities that endangered their lives
during the typhoon.
Fiesta
One of the unfortunate side-effects of the typhoon was the damage to
fruit crops. Fortunately rambutan season was winding up so
I'd
had a chance to eat my fill of the spiky red fruits, but the lansones
crop was pretty much wiped out. Not too long after the
typhoon, I
went with Dr. Fernando and Marilyn to a party in a town near San Pablo.
Each town has its saint day fiesta, and one of Dr. Fernando's
friends was having a celebration at his house the night before the
fiesta. The streets in his neighborhood were criss-crossed
with
shining streamers and decorated with bunting. Our host
explained
that normally he'd have lots of lansones for the guests to eat, but
because of the typhoon they were unavailable. Instead, we had
a
variety of dishes provided by a caterer, including a thick stew.
I started eating what I thought was okra, only to find out
that
it was a hot pepper added to flavor the stew. Fortunately the
pepper wasn't too hot, but it was an unpleasant surprise. My
favorite part of the meal was buko salad, a dessert. Buko is
Filipino for coconut, and the salad had strips of coconut, orange
gelatin, nata de coco, and corn in a cream base. The
celebration
seemed to be typical of Filipino hospitality - the host and his family
had never met me before, but they were very welcoming and seemed
pleased to have me there.
Earthquakes
I've spent most of my life in areas that aren't especially geologically
active, though I've managed to feel an earthquake or two while visiting
relatives in California. So when I felt the floor shaking one
night, I was excited once I figured out that it was an earthquake.
I was on the second floor, standing in a doorway and talking
to
Marilyn, and the shaking lasted for several seconds. It felt
like
a large truck going by, but we don't get large trucks going by the
house. The quake didn't do any damage. I missed the
one in
the middle of the night, but shortly after waking up the next morning,
I felt another tremor. After a few days I looked at the Phil
Volcs website to see the exact times and magnitudes of the earthquakes.
October 20, 10:30 p.m., 5.2 Ms (I assume that Ms means
"Magnitude scale" and refers to the Richter scale)
October 21, 1:27 a.m., 3.7 Ms
October 21, 6:09 a.m., 4.7 Ms
The earthquakes were centered in the ocean between Luzon and Masbate.
More information on earthquakes in the Philippines can be
found
at http://www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/
There are 23 stations that measured these earthquakes in the
Philippines, and by looking at the seismographs, it's apparent that at
least when these earthquakes occurred, there was more seismic activity
registering in the southern part of the country (Leyte, Mindanao) than
elsewhere. In some places, earthquakes are associated with
volcanic activity, and there are at least three active volcanoes on
Luzon, two of which have been in the news since I arrived.
Mt.
Bulusan, in southern Luzon, has been spewing ash, and Taal volcano,
which is a couple hours south of Los Baños, had 29
earthquakes
in a 24-hour period in late September.
Salon
Grace had been saying for quite a while that she and I would go to the
salon to get my hair cut and be pampered. Salons aren't too
expensive here, and I figured it would be a nice way to spend an
afternoon together. We first went to a hairdresser where I
paid
for a haircut and took a number. The price list offered all
kinds
of options, some of which I still don't understand.
Straightening
is self-explanatory, but rebonding and cellophane are more of a
mystery. I think cellophane refers to the impossibly shiny
hair
that's a feature of every shampoo and conditioner ad on TV.
There
were signs warning patrons to speak up if they used blackening shampoo,
had rebonded hair, or were pregnant. I didn't want to imagine
what kind of chemicals were used that could possibly cause birth
defects. While I waited, I watched the other women in the
shop.
Most of them were getting some kind of thick white stuff
combed
through their hair. The hairdressers wore gloves, but it
looked
like the same pair of gloves was used for the whole day, or possibly
for more than one day.
When the man giving haircuts was finished with the previous customer, I
sat down and Grace talked to him briefly. She told me he was
going to trim off about an inch and layer my hair.
Unfortunately,
it didn't work out that way. I did manage to keep the man
from
giving me bangs, but I ended up with a haircut that I really didn't
like - chin length on either side of my face, tapering to one waist
length lock in the back. It's the same haircut I've seen on
countless Filipino women, and it's not one I'd ever have chosen for
myself. I tried not to show how unhappy I was, but I think
Grace
sensed it anyway. I told her several times that it would grow
out. The last thing the hairdresser did before we left was
trim
my eyebrows. He unwrapped a fresh razorblade and went to
work.
I didn't realize until after we'd left that in the process of
cutting and shaving, he had cut me. I splashed some rubbing
alcohol on as Grace and I walked to the next salon.
At first, the second salon was a lot more fun. It was big,
brightly lit, and had good air conditioning. There was music
playing and the hairdresser "girls" were obviously having a good time.
Most of them were transvestites with fantastically styled
hair.
I had my hair washed, combed with conditioner, and wrapped in
a
towel (hair spa treatment). Then I joined Grace in the foot
spa
room, where we soaked our feet for a while in warm water and flipped
through ancient magazines. It's a good idea to bring your own
reading material if you head to a salon. The young woman who
worked on my feet was very shy and kept laughing every time she tried
to ask me a question. She was worried that her English wasn't
very good, but I assured her it was much better than my Tagalog and
eventually she relaxed a bit. She scrubbed my lower legs and
feet
with an abrasive cleaner, massaged my feet, and scraped away with a
giant emery board. I didn't enjoy that part - the board had
sharp
edges and I didn't have much in the line of calluses to remove, so it
ended up hurting. After the foot spa was done, my hair was
washed
and rinsed and then blow-dried a bit at a time. The "girl"
kept
asking if I wanted a trim, even though I explained that I'd just had my
hair cut.
The last items on the agenda were a manicure and pedicure. I
hadn't had either done before, and I watched as Grace had hers.
The manicurist moved right from doing Grace's fingernails to
doing my toenails and I wondered whether salons in the US are required
to clean or sterilize equipment between uses. I chose not to
have
my cuticles trimmed, or my fingernails cut, and as the woman starting
filing my fingernails to shape them, I realized why I never file my
nails. The sensation was the physical equivalent to hearing
nails
being dragged down a blackboard. I gritted my teeth as
unpleasant
shivers went down my back. When we left, I was tense and
unhappy
and concluded that I'm just not cut out for a life of glamour.
I'm certainly never getting another manicure, though I may go
back to the second salon to get the long back of my hair trimmed to a
length that fits better with the shorter sides. I wished that
I
had enjoyed the experience more, but in the end I regretted going.
I didn't want Grace to feel bad for persuading me to go, so I
paid for her spa treatments too - her smile of thanks was the high
point of my afternoon.
Last
updated: January 3, 2007
