Let the Phil Navy build a hospital ship!

There is a bit of worrisome news that appeared in the second page of The Philippine Star yesterday entitled. "Tropical Cyclone may enter PHL this month-Pagasa." Why do I say that this is worrisome news? It's because since we got hit by the world's strongest typhoon "Yolanda" international code name "Haiyan" last Nov. 8th, I submit that the Philippines has not done anything to make preparations if this year we will see another Yolanda hit our country. If they have made any preparations, they haven't told us yet!

By now you may have already known that some 1,200 rot-ting corpses were recently buried in a mass grave in Tacloban City, which only tells you that the National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council didn't finish their job for it is their job to search and rescue typhoon victims and if that search fails to find warm bodies, they must also bury the dead in order to save the living from any potential disease those dead bodies may be carrying. But then, the NDRRMC didn't even care to continue counting those who died or perished in that typhoon.

In hindsight, granted that there was time or resources for the City of Tacloban to move nearly a million people out of harm's way from the coming super typhoon, ask yourself; where would they have brought those people? Granted that when the folks in Tacloban living near the seashore decided to flee to the mountains of Tacloban City, I believe that a lot of those people would still have perished because of the debris flying horizontally thanks to the 315 kph typhoon. People would have been hit by those debris especially that there really was nowhere to go for those people.

But then, we are now in hindsight mode…therefore we'd like to know what kinds of preparation does the NDRRMC have in store just in case another Yolanda threatened our country? If you want my honest opinion, the NDRRMC is as prepared today as it was prepared yesterday. In short, we can no longer expect anything from the people manning the NDRRMC.

At this point, allow me to introduce my suggestions on how best to prepare for any natural disaster. First is to get Congress to budget and then construct a huge facility to house relief goods. That means building a huge concrete bunker a floor below the ground where at least ten container vans on top of their trailers would contain, medical supplies, relief goods, food and water, enough to help at least 10,000 families for one week. Inside that bunker are chainsaws that can be used to cut trees and open up roads. Let's throw in a generator to allow lights to be turned on during brownouts.

Now if each Congressional District in Typhoon threatened areas would be able to allocate a budget for this, we can hope that this facility can be done after a six-month construction period, just in time for the typhoon season. But will the members of Congress get themselves ready to put a budget into such a plan? I certainly hope so. Then there is the issue of making the Reserve Officers Training Corps compulsory again in the next school year. Doing so will certainly give each district the warm bodies that would be available to help the people in their time of need.

Finally, my best suggestion is for the Philippine Navy or Philippine Coast Guard to have our shipyards in Cebu or in Subic Naval Base construct a floating hospital, which will be manned by the Navy or Coast Guard. This hospital ship can be used on a daily basis by going to farflung islands where many people living in so many small islands have no chance of getting any medical help as the nearest hospital is just too far away. If we had this hospital ship, it can also be diverted to serve a city or town that has been devastated by a typhoon.

Come now, the Philippines now hosts two of the top shipyards in the world. The Tsuneishi (Cebu) Shipyard and that Korean Shipyard in Subic. These shipyards can easily make this particular type of vessel and all we need to do is make wards out of each deck and operating rooms somewhere in those decks. Sure, it may cost the Philippine government some money, but look at the cost benefit in building such a new vessel.

Best of all, we have more than our share of Filipino doctors and nurses who cannot work abroad and are now employed in call centers. We can even ask our many medical schools or universities to take turns in manning this Hospital Ship so that each medical intern or nurse can have a tour of duty in that vessel, which can add to their grade level. But with this suggestion, I doubt if Con-gress would jump at the opportunity to build this.

Our problem in this country is that, we've got a lot of smart people who can make things happen. What we lack are leaders, political or otherwise who can point this nation in the right direction, even if it is only to prepare ourselves just in case another super typhoon Yolanda makes an appearance in our shores and catches us unprepared once more.

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