THE AIR still reeks of melancholia; I must say I am still haunted by depression, nine days from that fateful morning of June 21 when floods swallowed not just Iloilo City but all of Iloilo Province as well. Friends confessed they also felt the same way and they can’t explain having been suck into the collective depression.

Iloilo Province and City have no monopoly of the tragedy wrought by typhoon Frank. Capiz, Antikque and Aklan are also reeling in the aftermath from lives and properties lost.
For the first time, they say.

For the first time, floods came all of a sudden leaving its victims little precious time to flee, much less, turn back to save belongings.

For the first time, Ilonggos witnessed vehicles tossed by the torrents like matchboxes from the roads or their garages, to the farm fields.

For the first time, Ilonggos have seen so much grief and losses as Frank exacted not just the worst property damages but human lives as well. The death toll in Iloilo Province alone is 126; 109 are missing and 948 injured, said Jerry Bionat, secretary of the Iloilo provincial disaster coordinating council as of July 1.

Iloilo City also sustained the worst calamity in decades in lives and properties. Communities in Mandurriao, Iloilo City, which never saw any flood before for the first had a taste of one.

The town center of Pavia was under water, for the first time in its history. Two district hospitals – in Januiay and Barotac Viejo – for the first time were flooded.

Early morning of June 21, power was out the entire Iloilo. It would be back, after all, it was just the gusty rains that caused it. The storm would just be over in a few hours. Or so we thought.

But as we turned on our little transistor radio shortly after waking up, the first voice that popped out was Gov. Niel D. Tupas’s, reporting that the river overflowed and appealing for rescuers from the Philippine Navy or the Coast Guard to save families trapped along the roadside and patients at the district hospital. Iloilo was already engulfed by a calamity and we did not know it.

Aksyon Radio’s marathon coverage kept my ears glued to the radio. Most of the reports that came from it sounded surreal, incredible but real.

And humbling, reminding us of our helplessness when mother nature strikes. There was a collective helplessness as we heard of survivors seeing loved ones pulled farther and farther away by the water, some never to be seen again, the other “luckier” ones would be found later lifeless, some dismembered hanging on mangrove branches littered with debris.

We heard the voices of two mayors weeping at their helplessness. One saw a family of four on waving and screaming for help on top of a house floating down on the river and seeing them thrown to raging water as their only life saver, their house itself, hit a bridge.
Seeing videos of bridges in Cabatuan, Alimodian and Januiay, most only with beams left standing is paralyzing.

And infuriating. They toppled not just from the torrents but by the logs and uprooted trees that multiplied the force of the water into a battering ram.

Frank reminds us how fragile mother earth now has become as industrial wastes spikes its temperature and sends its climactic cycles in disarray.

Climate change or global warming is at our doorstep now seen in hotter and longer dry months and fiercer typhoons that we have in Frank.

Logging (whether legal or illegal despite denials by the DENR and LGU) at the watershed in Maasin is real, the logs, 1,000 or so of them, that hurtled down show so. They were already cut and ready to transport, or they were already “girdled” (their outermost layer peeled off for slow death) that they were readily uprooted.

It’s now time for Jerry Treñas of Iloilo City, a typhoon victim himself and who used well his power as mayor to clean up the highway fronting his house of mounds of sludge and garbage ahead of all other unlucky streets crying for sweepers – Frank should remind him to stop flirting with racketeers behind the planned coal-fired power plant in Iloilo City.

Frank teaches us that progress is inseparable from a healthy environment.

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