EDITORIAL - The worst is yet to come

It is understandable that up to this day, two years after Yolanda, much of the talk would still revolve around what the government did or failed to do in its aftermath. After all, while Yolanda has been aptly described as the most powerful storm ever to hit land in recorded history, words alone can never fully characterize what that cataclysmic event meant to the people who went through it.

Until each and every person who has been through Yolanda directly or indirectly have themselves passed on to memory, there will never be any end to the telling and retelling of the experience. Yet the sad and scary thing is, there is no telling when Yolanda will be back, under a different name perhaps, and toward a different target this time, but with the same demeanor dreaded by all and unwanted everywhere.

We have been warned repeatedly that because of climate change storms will be getting stronger and more frequent. Their behaviors will increasingly be difficult to predict, as when only very recently, a powerful storm hit Yemen when only very rarely does that country ever experience any, and a monster of a storm that many saw could approximate Yolanda turned out to be a whimper in comparison as it traversed Mexico.

We delve into the future not to be doomsayers or alarmists but to warn everyone that while it is perfectly all right to dwell on Yolanda, let it not be at the expense of our preparedness for what the experts say could be the worse that is yet to come. For while lightning in all its randomness hardly strikes the same place twice, if ever, the same cannot be said of storms, which by the nature of their birth, must follow certain particular tracks.

We need to remind ourselves that the Philippines lies squarely in the path of a typhoon corridor owing to the happenstance of its location in the Pacific, where typhoons are born. Typhoons are normally born on or above the equator east of the Philippines and then move either directly west or follow a northwesterly track toward us.

What time of the year they are born and how far new typhoons form above the equator and whether they move directly westward or follow a northwesterly track only determine where in the Philippines they will likely strike. But as sure as the sun rises in the east, they will strike. And if the experts are to be believed, and there is nothing to show why they should not be, they will be striking more frequently and with more devastating strength.

And while we can go no debating about Yolanda, we should also be debating, not tomorrow or next month, but right now about what we are to do as a means of preparing ourselves. It is a scary situation indeed when such weighty words as preparedness and resiliency suddenly become jaded in the repetition but without actually meaning anything. There is a need to sound the alarm because it seems we are all talk but nothing has really moved toward anticipating the worst that is yet to come.