MANILA, Philippines – As heavy rains and winds battered Metro Manila, 22-year-old Marie Gold Villar waded through knee-deep floods for close to an hour to get home in Sta. Mesa. It was the last hour of her four-hour trip home from her class at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.
“I tried to catch up with the LRT, but there were no more cars. So I walked for 45 minutes from Pureza [LRT station] home to Bacood, Sta. Mesa,” Villar said.
“It took me almost four hours to commute home,” said the community development student who left UP after class around 5:30 p.m. Thursday.
Thousands like Villar were stranded in floods and heavy traffic around Metro Manila as continuous rain – 14 times the daily average recorded every June, according to weather bureau data – poured for 24 hours because of the southwest monsoon.
Some 147.3 millimeter of rain fell at the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Service Administration’s (Pagasa) rain observatory, the Science Garden in Quezon City, from 8 a.m. Thursday to 8 a.m. Friday. That didn’t count the downpour that came in the afternoon and went on intermittently deep into the night.
“The rainfall yesterday [Thursday] was much more compared to the normal rainfall every June in Quezon City, which is 311 mm. every month, or 10 mm. per day. In one day, we had 147.3 mm,” said Pagasa weather forecaster Aldczar Aurelio.
From 2 p.m. to 5.p.m. alone, 44 mm. of rain was measured at the Science Garden, twice the hourly rainfall rate considered heavy (7.5 mm).
He explained that rains in the last few days were brought on by the southwest monsoon, which the weather bureau has been warning about since Tuesday.
“We have been saying that by Thursday, there will be rains because of the monsoon. We were expecting that [the public] would say they were not well-informed, they think it’s [the rains] because of the storm, but it’s because of the southwest monsoon,” said Aurelio.
Rains were as heavy at the Port Area in Manila at 199.8 mm within 24 hours, 33 mm. of which fell from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursday.
At the airport complex in Pasay City, 151.5 mm. of rain were measured from Thursday morning to Friday morning, Pagasa data showed.
The weather is expected to improve across the country by Sunday, when northbound Tropical Storm Falcon is forecast to be in Northern Japan. Falcon is expected to exit the Philippines Saturday morning.