I do not know why I cannot still get over with this typhoon Lando that brought countless miseries to all of us, leaving us mourning for dear love ones. Lando is such an insensitive animal, if we can call it that way, when it hasten to add to the already long list of our departed brothers and sisters, especially so when we are approaching All Souls Day on the 2nd of November. And for the destruction Lando brought to us, especially the livelihood of so many of our kababayans, it is simply a downer as we approach Christmas season. Why, oh Lando, why?
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But what is in this Lando name? A quick consultation with ask.com gave some insights to the name. It turned out Lando is a short name for Rolando. It means “the coolest kid or person one can hope to meet,” or “a famous person throughout the land.” If I may relate and or interpret, it means in our street language, “presko.” It is no wonder when typhoon Lando was wrongly forecasted by all the weather centers of Hawaii, Japan, Korea, to include our our Pag-asa to quickly pivot to its right after landfall, it decided to make his presence known and be felt hard by us Filipinos. It wants to become famous like the politicians that started spreading their empty promises even before they filed their candidacies. And indeed, contrary to its very slow speed in touring the entire Luzon, it became quickly famous to be remembered to have battered Luzon into submission.
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One last thing for typhoon Lando. Come to think of it. Is it related to typhoon Yolanda? – the very famous female named typhoon that left one of the most number of destruction in the entire world or weather disturbances. It appears to be so as we can coin the name Landa from Lando. Oh my, I am being paranoid. Am I?
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As promised, I offer some cents-worth piece of advice or pointers that I learned from our date with Lando. The key pointer here is preparation. Part of the preparation is to closely watch out or monitor the weather forecasts from the experts. In our jurisdiction here, the expert is the Pag-asa – DOST. It should be the lead provider of data on how to appreciate the movement of a particular weather disturbance that has a clear probability to affect a part of our country, especially when its path is towards one’s area. But that is not enough. There are other weather centers that are making a living in tracking by the minutes and hours how the weather behaves. Caution however is to be made because their outputs are mere forecasts or estimates. But more often than not they are reliable tools or information we can use in our preparations.
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While we have prepared, ours are not enough. We thought that it will just be the same typhoon to come and pass upon us. Yes, we stocked food, bought candles, recharged our cute and latest rechargeable lamps and flashlights, stocked drinking and washing water, water, recharged our mobile phones, ensured that we have enough LPG contents, and readied small containers to catch drips from the ceiling. Those were not enough when Lando came and stayed longer than we have expected. The result? We have wet and soaked beddings and pillows, empty food cabinets and refrigerators, consumed candles and dead batteries of lamps and flashlights, dead tablets and iPads, no radio and TV because we have no power for the longest time. Water dripped into our homes from all directions. The small containers and tupperwares occupied our beds and sofas and even the dining table! We have blown ceiling and sidings of our houses. The roads were blocked with dangling cable wires and power lines, broken trees and collapsed roads and retaining walls.
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To all who were able to prepare completely and stood their ground when Lando came, I salute you. You have to share your experience to all of us who did not prepare well. We can only count our blessings after Lando. In our place in Philex Mines, while we are in rehab mode, we are also revisiting established procedures and brainstorming on how it can respond to future scenarios of such magnitude. The next point, the most crucial and the hardest, is execution. I sensed that constant reminders coupled with no-nonsense mock drills may enhance greatly our readiness and preparation.
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One last note. I was amused to see an advisory from one of the big educational institutions in our beloved City that was posted in the very famous Facebook. It was announced that the school have classes until October 31 and to resume November 2. The reason is to give sufficient time for the students to travel back to their places to pay a visit to their departed love ones. Fine, right? But a reply said – “sufficient time?.. with only a day?.. no kayat yo agdidinnanog tayon!” For me there is a solution to this – just ask your departed relatives and love ones to be the ones to visit you! I am sure that would be fun! There you have it, and to borrow the off-repeated phrase from the kalye talk of the youngsters — let’s rock and roll to the world!
