President Excuse

While ranting about the government’s handling of relief work in areas ravaged by  Supertyphoon “Yolanda” can’t do much, one  can’t help but lament how slow things are moving.

Planeloads of international and national aid have landed, but goods can’t roll out to the places that need them most.

Help is    trickling in   at snail’s pace. That, alone is,  alarming.

Today is the seventh day since Yolanda pounded  Samar, Leyte, northern Cebu, Biliran, Panay Island, Romblon, Masbate and nothern Palawan, all laid to ruin by 300 kilometer-per-hour winds and storm surges.

Road clearing,  law enforcement to stop nighttime looting, and clear directions for which agency to handle what part of the disaster field have to scale up faster.

Even international aid agencies, which continue to send teams and goods, to Leyte and Samar, wonder how to get the momentum going when government resources seem thinly spread and lacking in decisive action.

On May 8, 2008, cyclone Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar. The official death toll  by the military government was 22,500 although relief organizations peg it at  around 140,000.

Nargis survivors recount  30-foot storm surges from the Indian Ocean which  wiped out fishing communities tens of kilometers deep into the delta.
Relief organizations blamed the high death toll of Nargis on 1) lack of preparation and 2) the belligerent refusal of the Burmese Army-led government to accept international relief led by the United Nations. Days beforehand, the Indian government had warned the military rulers of Myanmar to prepare for the supertyphoon.

Relief workers found out that most of the deaths were borne out of hunger and disease. When they reached some communities three weeks after the storm, the dead bodies were still fresh.

The Myanmar government reluctantly accepted international relief efforts 18 days after Nargis struck.

In the case of the Philippines, the government and people had at least five days to prepare for  Supertyphoon “Yolanda.”

Weather agencies were already pressing the alarm button about Haiyan, the storm’s international name, heading for  the Visayas, a storm more violent that last year’s typhoon  Pablo (international name Bopha) that claimed at least 1,100 lives in southeastern Mindanao on December 4, 2012.

Yes,  preparations were taken.  Many say there was  little one could do to blunt the impact of what was the world’s  strongest typhoon to hit land in recent history with its  315 kph to  375 kph winds.

A week after, many of the areas that took the full brunt of the supertyphoon  still haven’t received relief goods.

In Guian, Eastern Samar where Yolanda first made landfall, help came three days after the super storm hit.

When CNN’s Christiane Amanpour interviewed President Aquino last Tuesday, P-Noy  blamed the slow response on the sad fact that the local government units – the first responders – were victims themselves. He said the  national government had to take over. Yes, but that happened a day after landfall, right?

The scale of the calamity made emergency response complex.  But spending a week to get things started  right is  hard to accept in a country that is proud of its democracy.