Unloved attic was life-saving refuge from fury of ‘Yolanda’

Photo by Ryan Leagogo/INQUIRER.net

PALO, Leyte—Venus Palacio never really liked her attic. But the room she thought was a useless part of her dream house became her family’s lifeline as it saved all nine members of her family from Supertyphoon “Yolanda’s” killer waves on Nov. 8.

“On that fateful day that could have been our last day on earth, that room was our refuge and salvation,” said Palacio, a 58-year-old grandmother who works as a disbursing officer at the local Department of Environment and Natural Resources in Tacloban City.

Close to a month after one of the worst storms in history killed nearly 6,000 people in Leyte and Samar, most survivors point to the attic as the one place that saved them from Yolanda’s quick-rising floodwaters.

Buffer, storage room

Not really known as an important part of Philippine houses, the attic is used more as a buffer from the elements and a storage room. But at the height of the typhoon’s fury, many residents squeezed themselves into their attics, thus shielding them from the 20-foot storm surges spawned by Yolanda.

“I never really liked that room, to tell you the truth. I never went there. But I am thankful it saved my family,” said Palacio.

It was not only humans that got saved by escaping into the attic, some animals also found a sanctuary there from the monster waves.

When Christina Romualdez, a former actress, told a Manila television station that hiding in the attic with rats saved her family, the wife of Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez and a serving Tacloban councilor also magnified the importance of the attic as a lifeline for thousands of storm survivors.

Swimming with snakes

“If she (Romualdez) was swimming with rats, we were swimming with snakes and frogs,” said Lea Sevilla, 59, a medical technologist whose family was also saved by climbing and hiding in their attic in their house in Barangay Cogon here.

But not all houses here have attics. The absence of attics in the mostly nipa-thatched houses along the coastlines proved fatal for most of the poor residents here.

Dioscoro Olaya Jr., a 36-year-old driver, his wife Marisol, 30, their three children—Analou, 12, Jeric, 3, Julianne, 1, and another family member, Adan Hingo, 61, were all swept out to the sea and drowned by the giant waves.

“I don’t think it would have saved them,” Olaya’s father Dioscoro Sr. , 58, said. “Even with an attic they still would have been killed,” he said.

Looking up

The attic is known in popular culture as the hiding place of Jews escaping the marauding Nazi storm-troopers during World War II. But at the height of the killer typhoon (international name: “Haiyan”), most survivors had no choice but to hide in their attic to escape Yolanda’s rampaging floodwaters.

But the Yolanda survivors offer a different meaning why the attic was the refuge of choice.

“Maybe God wants us to look up again,” Palacio said as she clutched an image of Our Lady of Fatima, the object of frantic veneration by her family in the attic as Yolanda unleashed her lethal assault on that fateful early morning of Nov. 8.

“We have forgotten God that we hardly look up anymore,” Palacio said.

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