Government hit for failure to act on flood peril.
Cabinet ignored scientists’ warning
By Fernando del Mundo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Barely a month into the Aquino presidency, green activists warned Cabinet officials of a looming climatic catastrophe.

The warning went largely ignored, but the Climate Change Congress of the Philippines (CCCP) headed by Archbishop Antonio Ledesma plodded on, raising alarm bells.

The warning was repeated to Cabinet officials in an antipoverty conference two weeks before Tropical Storm “Sendong” struck on December 16.

Officials on the ground were caught unprepared as the howler strayed from the normal typhoon corridor and turned its wrath on the largest and widely denuded watershed in Northern Mindanao.

The deaths and destruction in the storm rampage and the flash floods it ignited surpassed anything the world has seen in the past 12 years, according to a US meteorologist.

Swaths of impoverished urban settlements mainly from the hard-hit cities of Cagayan de Oro (CDO) and Iligan disappeared in the deadly brown torrents of slime and mud. Freshly cut timber from the Lanao mountains tumbled and smashed communities in the lowlands.

The official death toll has reached 1,200 and around 2,000 are missing—more than the 902 people who perished in the storm in Brazil in January, or the 657 who died in massive floods in Thailand in the past three months.

Scores of bodies are still being fished out of the waters of Macajalar Bay more than a week later.

“The point is that the country was fully forewarned about the CDO watershed vulnerabilities,” the CCCP said.

A visiting UN official likened the devastation in the Misamis Oriental capital to a destruction by a tsunami. Photographs of the city certainly reminded this writer of Banda Aceh in Sumatra, which was destroyed in the aftermath of the tsunami that a massive earthquake unleashed in December 2004.

As the magnitude of the Sendong disaster unfolded in Mindanao, the CCCP issued its oft-repeated plea, “Let us avoid another catastrophe … Let us save the future—now!”

The organization of civil society groups urged President Aquino to put in place an integrated watershed management program “immediately and decisively” instead of a “narrow and selective” rehabilitation initiative.

“The reality is that the whole country can be divided into different watersheds, with varying levels of vulnerabilities. We all live in a watershed,” said the statement signed by Ledesma, the archbishop of Cagayan de Oro,  and CCCP coconvenor Christian Monsod.

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