Earthquake? We're not ready for the big one!

When he was alive, I would usually go to Manila at this time because it is the birthday of my dear friend and mentor, the late Sir Max Soliven, publisher of The Philippine Star lest he’d get sore at me if I didn’t come to honor him on his birthday. He would have been 83 today. He passed on to eternal live six years ago on Nov. 24, 2006. I have always attributed my being a journalist today to Sir Max; after all, he took me in as his apprentice and what a great 20 year journey it has been, until his untimely death in Tokyo.

It was indeed a rare privilege for me to have walked with one of the greats in Philippine journalism. Sir Max told me that early in his career, he was assigned in Cebu (he stayed in the house of a relative in Urgello St.) during the late 50s, but then Cebu City was very much a sleepy town in those days. He later found himself covering the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War and he was in Indonesia during the Gestapu military coup that ousted Bung Sukarno. Perhaps his claim to fame was when he was incarcerated by Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos when Martial Law was declared. He was put in the same cell as Sen. Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr.

He always bewailed the fact that he was arrested with a xerox copy of the Arrest, Search and Seizure Order (ASSO) signed by then Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile. Sir Max was one of the first victims of Martial Rule where Press Freedom was snatched away from journalists. It is for this reason that I could never forget Sir Max because it was through him that I learned how precious our Freedom of Speech is.

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Everyone’s still talking about that earthquake that struck us in Cebu around 9:00pm last Saturday night. We later learned that it was a magnitude 7.6 in the Richter Scale that struck off Surigao 30 kilometers inside the earth’s crust. I still don’t have the figures that shook us in Cebu City, but I reckon it was near intensity 5. This earthquake had people living in high rise buildings scampering into the streets. I live nearby the Windland Twin Towers and as I passed by, Juana Osmeña Ext. was filled with people, many of them Koreans who went down from their condos.

Fuente Osmeña was full of people, many from the call centers nearby and so too with the AsiaTown I.T. Park where the open areas were suddenly so full of people on a Saturday evening, when the night spots were usually full. Call us Filipinos lucky that many of our poor people live in shanties or those in the rural areas live in nipa huts for when an earthquake strikes, the worse thing that can happen is your hut would fall down, but it is not enough to kill or bury people. It is quite different in the Mediterranean where people live in stone houses, which crumble during a quake and bury many people.

But as far as we know, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) did not make any announcements on where was the epicenter of that earthquake, nor did they make any public announcements as to whether it was already safe for people to go back indoors. We only learned from the newspapers that there were 271 aftershocks red that were recorded after the Saturday quake according to the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs). If you ask me, we should call the NDRRMC’s inactivity as one of the biggest aftershocks.

The Freeman editorial yesterday said it all… that apathy was even stronger than the earthquake. Allow me to reprint a portion of that editorial, “One thing that was immediately striking was the apparent nonchalance of those who should have been the first to be concerned about such incidents—the government and the media. As the minutes stretched into hours after the quake, almost nobody tried to reach out to the public. Twirling the radio dials for any news of the quake, only one radio station dedicated air time to the incident… It was the same on TV, as far as the local networks were concerned. Except for one, show own reports were tentative and spotty, the rest never took the initiative to cut their programs to keep the public informed.”

This only tells you that the NDRRMC’s disaster preparedness is a big joke! What if that earthquake destroyed so much property or worse… killed hundreds of people? For sure, the NDRRMC would react with the same nonchalance and apathy. But perhaps the bigger apathy comes from our own people… why no one is showing their indignation against the NDRRMC? Oh well, call yourselves lucky that we got hit by a small earthquake last Saturday. But I assure you… after watching all those National Geographic Channel shows on such disasters… the big one is still coming and given the reaction of the NDRRMC to the small quake, I’m sure that they won’t be ready when the big one strikes us. So let’s point our fingers now before it’s too late.

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