When they return to their classrooms on August 8, pupils of Balza Elementary School here would be seated on cold floors and staring at blank walls with destroyed windows
On July 26, Tropical Storm “Juaning” brought heavy rains and strong winds, causing flooding in many areas of Albay, including this school. Floodwaters almost reached the rooftops of school buildings.
When the flooding subsided, the school was a picture of devastation. Tons of piles of logs, uprooted trees, leaves, branches and mud were strewn everywhere, some swept inside the classrooms.
“The blackboards, chairs, tables, windows and everything inside the rooms could no longer be found,” said Josephine Corral, one of the teachers.
Some windows and window grills were dislodged from their frames by the crashing waters and logs that could have come from Mounts Masaraga and Malinao. A few meters away from the school is a river and a field reaching out to the Albay Gulf.
“We don’t know where those (debris) came from. Maybe from the mountain,” said Corral. She described Juaning as the worst typhoon to have hit the village.
“We have to start from nothing. Everything is gone, including all our records,” she said while taking a break from cleaning the rooms.
Corral said the teachers were given two weeks to clean up and resume classes, but she was not sure if that would be enough time. Their priority, she said, was for the pupils to have school supplies because “everything was lost—their papers, notebooks and textbooks.”
Balza Elementary School has 413 pupils and 11 teachers. The village has 435 households, mostly relying on fishing or farming for livelihood.
Forty-eight kindergarten pupils used to hold classes in a hut, but the flood washed it away, Corral said. “We were lucky it was the town’s fiesta and it was a holiday so there were no students when the storm hit,” she said.
Only three of the eight classrooms were left with chairs. “Even that we have to check because we are not yet sure if those were not damaged,” Corral said.
The remaining chairs were all covered with mud and placed outside the rooms while cleanup activities were ongoing.
Some textbooks were left but these could no longer be used, Corral said.
Scraping funds from their own pockets and from the sale of metal scraps gathered, the teachers were able to pay P150 to P200 to parents and P20 to pupil-volunteers who helped in the cleanup.
Students Edison Rodriguez, 14, and Bernard Ivan Nobleza, 13, volunteered so they could go back to their school soon.
“Our houses were not that affected by the storm so we chose to help our school,” Nobleza said. He held about 10 ball pens found astray on the wet floor.
Malinao National High School, which is beside Balza Elementary School, suffered the same fate. Payloaders were still busy clearing the scattered debris.
Malinao is 32 kilometers north of Legazpi City and a 40-minute drive from there, but because of a damaged section of the road in Sto. Domingo town, vehicles were rerouted.
Power supply was irregular in some areas while most villages still do not have potable water due to damaged pipelines.
Malinao Mayor Avelino Ceriola said on Monday that almost all of the 29 villages in his town were affected by Juaning. Landslides occurred in the upland areas while floods hit the lowland areas.
“Malinao is the catch basin. Everything comes here,” Ceriola said. He added that a master plan was needed to address the problem.
The logs brought by the floods in Balza could have come from trees uprooted by landslides in the two mountains, he said.
“We cannot say that there was illegal logging in the mountains because the logs still had roots when these were found,” he said.
Ceriola said food, clothing, drinking water and shelter were still needed by the storm victims.