Forecasting with Confidence Part VI. Beyond policy: heeding the message of Yolanda

Posted on November 14, 2014 Updated on April 30, 2016

Forecasting with Confidence

Part VI

If we look at the world’s major disaster record: Hurricane Katrina, Haiyan (Yolanda), Japan tsunami, tropical storm Ondoy, the Ormoc Flash Floods, Haiti Quake, among many others, most of those that were killed, died swiftly and suddenly.

In almost all of these cataclysms there is barely little or no time to issue forewarning to the public, if at all. With all the technology abundant in our midst, the oft-repeated excuse is that, the disaster happened so suddenly – hitting at the population without warning. And as we cited in earlier discussions, it was chic to keep repeating with media the ersatz refrain that: “This was by far the strongest disaster to hit Fukushima / Tacloban City, etc. over the last one hundred years.” A convenient though nonsensical statement.

If we look at disaster alerts or warnings to the public, it is clearly mystifying that it often took several hours for the Philippine Atmospheric, Geospheric, Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) to declare particular communities need to evacuate.

PAGASA will tell us that to advise and eventually enforce evacuation is a difficult decision to make, as it will require so much on the part of the evacuees and those that will take them to supposedly safer places. Yet there is also much to consider before weather and climate risks show up.

PHIVOLCS’s case shows it to be more pro-active. It is able to give alerts that allows for much earlier evacuation than PAGASA.

Following constructive suggestions the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council (NDRRMC) and its counterparts in other areas, is increasingly becoming more pro-active in the area of hydro meteorologic events.

Aside from undertaking early evacuation during impending volcanic event (e.g. possible Mayon Volcano eruption in Albay), NDRRMC and private sector partners are now more active in doing advance evacuation prior to foreseen flooding.

The system is not yet as thorough and is being learned trial and error. In time, it will be mastered and by the time the mechanisms are perfected, more funds may be made available by more compassionate administrations in the future.

PAGASA public advisory alert matrix.

From the time when the late Pres. Ferdinand Marcos left, the succeeding regimes did nothing to radically and comprehensively improve the existing system for safeguarding populations from disaster. Much less was given to preventive or disaster risk mitigation measures.

The leaders of four regimes, including the incumbent one, coldly responded to issues raised about risk mitigation.

Two administrations – the previous one and the present – continuously refused to recognize the need for holding a broad based summit on disaster forecasting in the Philippines from 2010 to this year.

On their own, the two administrations are holding piecemeal meetings about disaster forecasting and conducting small-budgeted geohazard mapping and environment management projects but never being able to get into the core of the real risk mapping and establishing the living and breathing, functional system to track disasters while they are in formation mode and during the time when they grow to be actual storms or whatever form and shape the catastrophe will take.

The environment risk map takes more than just having a simple map or even a pseudo interactive digital image on the computer.

Beyond the Geographical Information System (GIS), the interconnection technology to make databases relate with each other, among many other factors, is the need for instance for geospatial information and intelligence.

Additional vital data can be provided by non-weather related satellites in orbit or fixed transit over earth or simply in space. Still other data need to be dispatched or transmitted from various and several, linked or independent sources like active terrestrial and space observation stations located in many places around the world today.

Whatever claims that may be made by any sector about completing this or that kind of disaster map, hazard map, is just a lie.

The stakes in sketching what kind of disaster is about to approach what area and when are just too high to gamble with simplistic, cheap maps that sometimes are also just little moneymaking ventures of corrupt individuals in the presently exceedingly corrupt Philippine setting.

As we noted in this site in the past, during the occurrence of tropical storm Ketsana (Ondoy) we consider it too impractical for the PAGASA not to announce evacuation.

With several hours of unrelenting heavy rainfall, it was also impossible that PAGASA kept announcing over media that Signal No. 1 could not yet be declared over Metro Manila. But at the time of these announcements, people were already dying. Entire communities like the Provident Village in Marikina were already being swallowed up whole by floodwaters.

Long before the super typhoon #Haiyan – #Yolanda hit ground in Guiuan, Samar, NDRRMC was already giving out storm warnings to the public.

So what are much better parameters for weather, climate, disaster agencies? To Geohazard Mapping of the Resource Recovery group, these parameters should seriously factor in as many variables as possible as there are measured by all forecasting agencies all around the world.

Most of all, there is a need to revamp the conventional wisdom about the cycle of evil of disasters.

It will take a great upheaval before most world politicians and the wielders of much of the global wealth will allow a new paradigm to become acceptable. It will take a large wave of both sentiment and positive action to emerge before populations like the people of Sendai that accepted and fully determined for their own sake that relocating to safer grounds is the best solution for human survival.

As a case in point, most certainly, everyone will consider it foolish for the people in Bourbon Street, New Orleans, Louisiana to vacate their residence and businesses despite what happened in Katrina. It will take the end of the world to make that happen.

In Venice, they built fortified extensions of the city of canals and the gondolas. No one can make the people of Venice live in another place instead. Again, it will take Armageddon for that to occur.

Surviving In Pain

A year after adjusting with extreme difficulty in receiving a second contract on Earth all of a sudden, Yolanda survivors have had to come to grips with the recent year and what still lies ahead. The future looks both bright and dim for many survivors.

Those affected by the disaster’s impact by remote, having been more than 100 kilometers from ground zero of the tragedy, are not excluded from the suffering multitudes that confronted Yolanda face to face.

In many ways, the aftermath of the disaster had been and will even be more painful for a lot of them.

They cannot avail of any kind of relief from anyone being far from the site of the tragic event despite that anyone of them that distant escaped being killed by the gruesome storm surge spanning a whole length of several towns and ending up in Tacloban City.

Some of these victims-by-remote of Yolanda do not have any living parents. Some have siblings that were killed or else fortunately survived.

In one particular case, the siblings living in Tacloban were just one day short of being killed having left Tacloban more than twenty hours before the powerful storm surge struck.

The distance of these remote affected Taclobanons did nothing to exempt cousins, uncles, aunts, granduncles and friends, classmates, childhood sweethearts, in laws, neighbors and many other people known to them either briefly or all their lives.

More pitiful is the plight of those in the disaster affected zone. Shelter, housing, despite the help of many private organizations, will still take some more years before full restoration.

Owners of private enterprise will take years to recover past productivity and profitability. Children will grow up with the trauma of Yolanda. Social loss, can never be replaced and repaired. The end of the suffering, excruciating for some, will never be in sight for everyone.

Disaster and Modernization

It cannot be said that just because we are no longer in Medieval times or earlier that we are more fortunate than our predecessors back in the day.

Hardly was there any kind of preparedness nor semblance of order among the populace and their ruling masters in the past.  Yielding helplessly to a severe state of confusion and disorientation compounded the suffering of survivors following each disaster.

There was no humanitarian mission to bring disaster relief goods, provide emergency health and medical assistance, temporary shelter in the form of tents, blankets and other items.

On each occasion, either fear and panic or mass conflagration ensues or both. A special phrase was coined specifically for such extraordinary events in the old times: plague.  Eventually, society invented the term fortuitous circumstance. Both ostensibly encompassed any and all unexpected events that are absolutely beyond human control.

Disasters are still beyond anyone’s control, but now these are detected very much in advance of their arrival. Populations can be exhorted and moved to prepare for eventualities.

Today we live in times where the conditions are no longer the same to those in the past when disasters were difficult to forecast using simple human ability. But the seers of old and simple farmers, trackers and fishermen who read the stars and the skies, may still beat our weathermen today for giving more accurate report and warning to their people.

Even with no existing evidence of an arriving calamity, intelligent machines can extrapolate the manner in which natural or even human-made catastrophe can happen.  Modeling software and technologies can predict the extent of damage and potential number of casualties, fatalities.

The reliable forecasters of old had to read unusual flights of animals, birds, insects among many other manifest signs to know there was disaster. Only shamans and witches smelled or sensed disasters without actually needing visual symbols.

In modern age, with positive effort it is not impossible to create models for sensing in advance cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes that have not even started to form.

Policy and Disavowal

Science, politics and finance can never be taken separately and independently.  In spite of the noblest of statements from any of these quarters to the contrary, all three sectors are intertwined.

In this sense, as made manifest by many disasters not being wholly tracked before they wreak total havoc upon populations, policy becomes a dimwitted and ridiculous thing.  Entire policy regimes are not only brainless they are also sinister.

All the technologies and systems for detection are already present and running. It takes just a flick of a finger to pinpoint any kind of anomaly and communicate the vital and necessary information to the concerned parties.

Yet the wielders of wealth take the people’s money but never give back to the masses. Anything that filters back to the poor through the AidNGOs of the rich often has strings attached to them.

On the part of politicians, they rake in as much skim from the national coffers as they can and shove it into the banks of the wielders of wealth, joining the ranks of the world’s Forbes Listed and the underworld lords, beneficiaries of Alvin Toffler’s phenomenon of rapid wealth creation by engaging in criminal enterprise.

In reference to Haiyan – Yolanda, PAGASA received numerous alerts from all over the world about the oncoming cataclysm, but since geospatial information and intelligence is not free and cheap, as much as it can, the alerts could only amount to so much volume of data as could be allowed.

In the geohazard community of practice, the Philippines, Burma, like many other poor countries, are not even given a decent status. Philippine representatives were not graciously extended invitation during the last conference of this group.

This may change in the near future (or at the very least, we hope it will) with the recognition by the geohazard community of practice of the extreme vulnerability of even such a small nation as the Philippines. Including the fact that you cannot fight world sympathy.

How that would help the country however during another time of major disaster similar to Haiyan – Yolanda, only time can tell.

Even Japan that is a source of financial support for the members of this specialized scientific community and therefore very eligible to receive and pay for vital geospatial data, was not spared by the suddenness of the tsunami that wrought too much destruction that was unheard of in this century.

Moreover, Japan has its own satellites. That makes the end result of the quake-tsunami doubly bedeviling. The cheap consolation was that the Prime Minister resigned. In the Philippines, his counterpart blamed everyone, but most of all the entire setup. “The systems failed. What can I do?” this politician said and that was that.

Denying Policy, Denial of Anti-Survival

The task of making a population safe is preceded by the act of determining the kind of natural or human-made threat that may, at one time in a foreseeable future hit the population.

We have consistently ruled that requisite out. For no comprehensible raison d’être at all, the conventional wisdom will proudly maintain a pervasive lack of an inclination to perform that act.

On the other hand, it becomes easy to blame the masses that there is resistance to enforced evacuation and to heap the accusation that the masses could actually be the real major cause of global warming.

In addition, because of the poor’s ignorance in conserving the environment that only the black guelphs and the royals are most conversant and have a monopoly of advocacy about, they must clearly be the principal suspect.

Such deliberate or unwitting refusal to undertake honest-to-goodness disaster forecasting and mitigation forces many leaders to heap blame on the silent majority.

This springs from a posture of disavowal by moneyed nations towards poor nations that they perpetuate as retrogressive agricultural enclaves or more primitive ones as much as they can.

As long as the Philippines or any other wretched country cannot produce a decent screw, screwdriver or any other similar item, it is better for the manipulating and controlling more powerful state.

Any pronouncement as to giving any form of support for Philippine modernization is simply, as the American Indians say, just pure bull manure.

Internally this perpetuation of backwardness by the wielder of power and wealth is present in a national capital’s refusal of true development aid for the countrysides.

Such cruel mindset is reflected succinctly in the ignoble posturing of the regime of Mr. Aquino in denying even the tiniest of aid for Tacloban long after the disaster has turned the poor victims in the area literally into replicas of zombies, disoriented, roaming the streets in abject hunger and utter perplexity and looting stores to temporally satisfy their craving for food or in some cases, personal items and utensils for survival.

Why give the poor and the rural, backward populations the right to keep themselves alive? In the next few years, as the United Nations keeps carping about, the world will have a population size that is no longer supportable by the amount of food that is produced in the planet.

Perhaps the survivalists  and enemies of banksters are right. There is wisdom in fighting the minority promoting the brutal worldview of decimation.

Every small energy should therefore be devoted by the sane populations around the world to bolster the fight for human survival and to eliminate the power of the purveyors of decimation.

Mitigation

What could have prevented the deaths from Ketsana – Ondoy of people sleeping in their homes or those that were trapped when the management of SM Shoemart Mall ordered a lockdown for fear of lootings when the Marikina River started rising? A big number of innocent shoppers and staff died like trapped mice inside that mall.

Many others, particularly those living at the banks of east Metro Manila floodways were washed away and killed by the raging runoff waters.  Similar death befell the victims of the floods in Cagayan de Oro City and Iligan City when Typhoon Sendong struck in 2011.

Unlike ebola that strikes one household after another until as British Broadcasting (BBC) says, one whole village has died, Katrina, Yolanda, the killer earthquake-tsunami that hit Japan and the Ormoc Flash Floods, only struck once.

The devastations in the case of these major disasters, are too hideous and defy imagination.  The havoc and desolation far outweigh that of many documented massive disease outbreaks.

In Tacloban, for example, whole or mangled corpses littered the streets, cadavers caught up in high angles, dead remains partly or fully buried in mud or debris or under several huge marine vessels, houses and infrastructures turned to rubble.

These are among many images of horrendous events that transpired on the onslaught of Haiyan.

The first encounter as you paid the scene a visit even several weeks and months passed long after the tragedy is the smell of death.

A stench too overpowering and numbing that almost divests the place of any humanity and life.

One of the considerations that disaster agencies should seriously factor into their forecast and public alert system is the projected size, breadth, extent of a disaster.

When quantified through seismic readings and other instrument as well as human obtained geologic information, volcanologists like those in PHIVOLCS can calculate the degree of damage and potential casualties in the eruption of Mt. Mayon.

Other data such as in the case of PAGASA can provide different projections.  With Haiyan – Yolanda, it would have been possible to forecast in a more credible way, how the storm surge might arrive and how it will affect people.

In hindsight, if the storm size of Haiyan – Yolanda were taken more seriously into consideration and its impact upon the targeted zones, it would have been possible to make the public alert more understandable, comprehensible.

When you exhort populations to leave their habitat and they understand the stakes well enough, even if the evacuation will be forced, at least there would be more lives saved than lost and you get better cooperation. You need therefore to get your facts straight, your briefing as satisfactory to the receiver as possible.

The fact that the PAGASA just defensively kept stating that they shouted “Storm surge coming! Storm surge coming!” five days, no! six days, no! seven days! before November 8, 2013, was not only inadequate and incompetent.

It was laughable, silly, stupid and contemptible. In sum however, it is to no fault of PAGASA on their own. It was just a function of policy and bad habit.

What the Philippines, a truly poor and neglected member of the brotherhood of nations and led by an incompetent leadership, can do is for its experts and scientists to improve on the disaster forecasting and mitigation on their own.

In particular, for flood alerts, the PAGASA should now be able to build a more thorough matrix of variables that will not only factor color code of the rainfall and flood alert, a tiny picture of light, heavy, massive rainfall and small description of appropriate action to take for the public with the terms monitor, alerto, lumikas filling up a last column in the existing matrix.

PAGASA can now create more fields or columns and make the recommended action to take more pro-active. PAGASA can also make its technology, info-data coordination with other weather agencies more aggressive.

One of the more sensible changes that PAGASA should consider, in coordination with the NDRRMC, is pinpointing the exact date and time of advanced evacuation for those that might drown or get killed during heavy flooding. PAGASA and the MMDA, the NDRRMC know how to calculate percentages of vulnerable residences and zones that floods will be able to infiltrate and damage.

This is true not only for the enclaves of the poor but for all types of enclaves as flood does not distinguish between economic status. You cannot evacuate people when it is too late, therefore it is useless to move people when the floods are already there – as in the case of Ketsana (Ondoy). Therefore now PAGASA and NDRRMC, as well as all other concerned agencies have to do their utmost to be more pro-active in this regard.

The number of residences and establishments in targeted zones that will be hit is important and the extent of the rise of the surface and subsea level runoff water.

These communities must be the priority areas that must be evacuated. Public warning systems must be installed and should work in areas that are usually most vulnerable to make warning and evacuation less tedious and often, hopeless.

Revising the public alert: New fields, columns to be added by PAGASA into its current public alert digital poster.

With that done, PAGASA can now be able to obtain as much input as possible to fill up an improved matrix for each and every atmospheric, geospheric and meteorological event that is its own name and function states.

To be true to its adopted slogan, “Tracking the Sky. . . Helping the Country.” PAGASA, and along with it, the PHIVOLCS, et al as one unified advocacy body should do its utmost best to insinuate itself more forcefully into the geohazard community of practice.

The cluster will increase its collaboration with all the members of the community including Asian neighbor countries that have good relations with the earth observation satellite group like Malaysia, Singapore, India among others.

After what happened in Bohol (#Boholindol) and in Tacloban (#Yolanda) The Philippines can no longer afford to keep being ignored in international bodies.

All kinds of funds are spent left and right for useless purposes and self-aggrandizement, funding these coordinations will merely be a small drop in the bucket. The money should never be denied, it should have been made available even before yesterday.

Furthermore, the Aquino regime should stop holding on to the salaries and benefits of disaster agency workers. What they have been stealing is already way too much, denying our disaster agency employees and experts is inhuman and allowing the deaths of multitudes in future disasters.

Only those more than crazy to commit indirect genocide can afford to do this and they surely must not deserve to be in government and must be punished severely after this regime relinquishes power.

It all takes a flitting moment after getting snagged in a hole on the ground to blame one’s self or another person for the accident. It took weeks for the victims of Yolanda to find the blame on a national government that refused to give even a modicum of help. But all that is past now.

Tacloban City’s Mr. Alfred Romualdez and the Philippines’ Mr. Benigno Aquino should stop the blame game and work together. If not, one of them has or the both of them just have to go. Then and only then can the next sun shining be a brighter sun, a warmer sun.

The story of Yolanda, for those who lived through it and were able to tell about it, is a story of hope.

It is a tale about tomorrow, a reminder of what needs to be done, rather than the memory of what has gone. By all measure, Yolanda, is a challenge of death and dying – to the living to press on and find new pathways to safety, security, survival, compassion, responsiveness and most of all positive action.

If it were all up to the scientists and those that mastered technological software and hardware alone, and they are not that stupid and foolish to perpetually engage in cerebral duels, endless intellectual masturbation and all other obtuse and ludicrous acts that compel them not to band and work together or stay in the right direction, it is possible to say that the world would be a better place.

At some point in time, many more populations around the globe will hit City Hall, tell it to the face of the omniscient demigods who mouth and enforce policy that they are nothing but a big load of shit and to shove their morass of bad policy up theirs.

That will the occasion for the odds for survival to get better for the world’s populations. If that happens, the souls of those that died in many world disasters like Yolanda and useless political conflicts maneuvered into happening by sinister forces will surely feel happier wherever they are on that day.

END NOTES
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The regime under Madam Corazon Cojuangco Aquino in 1986-87 became the instant beneficiary of no less than Japanese Yen Eight Billion (¥8-B) from JICA intended for flood control projects under the MMDA-DPWH. All the feasibility and technical studies to justify the funds were prepared under the previous administration and it took many years of project gestation before the money finally became available.

For reasons that could not be explained, that fund, was lost. If those financial resources were used for the purposes for which they were intended, they could have done a lot of good to ease the problem of severe flooding in Metro Manila. Such amount might have saved hundreds of lives during Ketsana-Ondoy. Unlike those that followed after her, Madam Aquino was never jailed for plunder. Madam Aquino went on to even further capture and hold hostage three other administrations including the incumbent one.

For the miniscule few philanthropic groups that do outreach without an agenda, a warm salute to all of them is in order and it is fervently prayed that these groups extend their programs and projects towards relocation and resettling – making human communities safer by helping them understand and move to safer grounds.

One of these groups is a Taiwanese Foundation that up to this time has been active in reconstruction of devastated homes in Tacloban and other Yolanda-damaged towns.

In earlier parts of this book, we have enjoined the following actions as part of the program to ensure safety and survival:

1. Ensuring people safety (Detecting, forecasting)

2. Making people know (Announcement)

3. Making people understand (Brief Narrative, Explanation in Laymen‘s terms)

4. Providing the people a course of Action (Command)

All these things require on the other hand, the following support factors:

1. Forecasting Technical Capability

2. Credibility

3. Delivery Mechanism (Public Warning and Briefing System)

4. Capacity Building (Training, Educating People)

5. Quick Response Capability

6. Evacuation to safe haven

7. Relief, Rescue and Recovery

8. Forensic and mortuary operations (in case of MCI)

9. Rehabilitation, Reconstruction

The size of a storm determines its costliness rather than strength, but far bigger storms trigger storm surge. Haiyan was a big sized storm hence the storm surge that struck Eastern Visayas and other areas.

“Size of a storm

“Observations indicate that size is only weakly correlated to variables such as storm intensity (i.e. maximum wind speed), radius of maximum wind, latitude, and maximum potential intensity.

“Size plays an important role in modulating damage caused by a storm. All else equal, a larger storm will impact a larger area for a longer period of time. Additionally, a larger near-surface wind field can generate higher storm surge due to the combination of longer wind fetch, longer duration, and enhanced wave setup. For example, Hurricane Sandy, which struck the eastern U.S. in 2012, barely attained hurricane intensity prior to landfall yet was one of the costliest landfalling hurricanes in U.S. history because of its extremely large size. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)”

Some of the past and recent disasters in the Philippines:*

Tropical Cyclones

First published in Global Geohazard Systems

Government agencies must altogether stop the practice of elbowing one another as to who will be Mr. and Ms. Climate Change, Mr. and Ms. Global Warming, or whatever label. No one agency must arrogate supremacy and monopoly for instance in hydro meteorologic concerns but cooperate with all the other agencies and accept that clustering, unifying policy advocacy, coordination and close interaction is the key to resolving all the issues besetting climate risk management.

One unbelievably tiny Philippine agency in particular advertises itself to hold the franchise to all water related disasters and the ruling honcho in climate change particularly in matters pertaining to water. This is just pure humbug, incredibly stupid and should never ever be allowed in a sane society. It will not be a wonder why international bodies will shy away from inviting the Philippines to international conventions. All agencies whose functions are disaster related, directly or otherwise, must behave more decently and get their act together.