With family in mind, man floats for 30 hours

For 41-year-old construction worker Pedro Gallardo Jr., sheer determination to see his family again sustained him through the raging muddy waters, the battering waves, and 30 hours afloat at sea without food.

“My mind was focused on being reunited with my family,” Gallardo related while waiting for his turn for an antitetanus shot at Initao Provincial Hospital.

“I struggled to do my best,” he said of his efforts to survive.

Around 11 p.m. on Friday, amid heavy rains and strong winds, Gallardo told his wife Carmen to evacuate with their two children aged 11 and 12, to the house of their friend near the national highway.

Gallardo decided to stay and guard their house in Iligan’s Santa Felomina village near Mandulog River.

Within 30 minutes, Gallardo said he sensed danger as the floodwater, now waist-deep, kept on rising, prompting him to join some 20 villagers on the rooftop of a neighboring two-story house of concrete and wood. At midnight, flooding swept the house away and smashed it onto a tree.

Christmas gift

“I thought that would be our last time to see each other,” said Malven Moleño, 38, a truck driver who worried about Gallardo because he knew Gallardo could not swim.

Thrown into the muddy waters, each of them struggled to take hold of whatever remained of the uprooted house. Moleño got an ironing board, Gallardo, a wooden slab formerly a wall of the house, to float along with.

As they reached the mouth of Mandulog river before being washed away to sea, huge waves, rising about four meters, battered them.

Moleño held on to his “lifeboat” and was rescued by fishermen; Gallardo lost his, but somehow managed to reach the shore, where he was reunited with his wife at Initao Provincial Hospital.

Despite the loss of the house, Carmen was pleased she found her husband. “It’s still Christmas for my family,” she said.