Disaster Management

While typhoon Caloy has claimed eight lives in Luzon and is still raging in some parts of the country, Mount Merapi volcano in Indonesia is also spewing burning lava from its crater, forcing thousands to evacuate.

As always, relocation sites could hardly accommodate the evacuees. Someone says, "He who fails to prepare for the night, fails to prepare for the dawn."

It is on the least expected moment that a potentially worst calamity would hit a community and change the face of history.

For instance, the Mabini insecticide poisoning was something so strange to us. Before it happened more than a year ago, we've never heard of anything like that, not only in the history of our province but also in the history of the Philippines. And we were caught with tremendous surprise - so shocking that most of us, especially the authorities who handled the tragedy, can hardly figure out how to respond to the calamity.

But being unprepared for disaster can also be an issue even to the industrialized world. Take the case of Katrina Hurricane in the U.S. The world was surprised upon learning that America, with its image of being a superpower and being the king of search and rescue, was at a loss of managerial skill, including pooling of resources, when the devastating hurricane swept Florida last year. The U.S., the world had realized, was just like the rest of the world: unprepared for the worst.

"Crime, disease, war, revolution, fire, flood, periodic financial collapse and famine are the results of nature and the nature of man and unfortunately are not within the power of anyone on this earth to prevent," an author says.

This is part of the package of being alive on earth. However, some damages can be prevented if we exert a conscious effort for disaster preparedness.

The tendency is that we have a complacent attitude toward calamity. It is only when calamity has affected us overwhelmingly that we begin to rethink our attitude about it. Sometimes the rethinking and the repositioning of our priorities are too late. The damage is already irreversible.

Living in a government that is as unprepared as its ordinary citizen, the burden of surviving is upon the individual who understands the grand scheme of things in this world.

Because if one has no one to run to, he has to run to himself. So one has to become a survivalist in his own ways, in his own terms.

Listen to a writer who admits of