Almost 90 years to the day a violent storm passed over Cebu, I thought we would go through one as the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration began announcing Monday the approach of Typhoon Ramon to Cebu. Thankfully enough, the storm has literally passed, barely noticed if not for the dark clouds that hovered the whole day yesterday.
This was alas not the case with the super typhoon that wreaked havoc over the Visayas, passing very close to Cebu City on Oct. 14, 1912. Dubbed “Bagyo sa Doce” for want of a name (the naming of typhoons became standard practice only in the 1940s), the storm lashed the Visayas for four days, from Oct. 13 to 16, leaving a swath of destruction and despair.
Downtown Cebu, dusty, unpaved and sunny just days before, became a lake overnight as esteros and creeks overflowed into nearby streets. In Lucy Urgello Miller’s book “Glimpses of Old Cebu: Images of the Colonial Period,” there are three photographs showing the destruction wrought by the typhoon which included dead cattle on the streets, flattened and roofless houses as well as debris all over the city.
A steel bridge over the Butuanon River in Mandaue, built in 1896-98, collapsed as one of its abutments gave way. The typhoon did not spare even the Osmeña Waterworks Dam at Buhisan, which had just been inaugurated in February that same year. “The dam proper resisted the force of the water, but the rock embankment and parapet wall south of the dam were washed away, leaving a gap in the hillside through which much of the reservoired water escaped,” thus reported the dam’s designer, Engr. Eusebius J. Halsema to the Bureau of Public Works later that year.
We do not know the maximum wind speed packed by the Bagyo sa Doce but Halsema reported that an estimated 22 inches of water were dumped on the city in just six hours. Alas the attendants of the rain gauge at the local office of the Weather Bureau were not able to dump the collected rainfall on their rain gauges when it got full due to the havoc wreaked by the typhoon, thus, we are left with an estimate. The Buhisan Dam had been designed by Halsema based on a 10-year record of maximum rainfall in Cebu at 6 inches over a 24-hour period. In fact, before this typhoon, Cebu was averaging about 17 inches of rainfall per month.
Two other super typhoons passed directly over the city after 1912: Typhoon Rena, which crossed the Visayas on Nov. 7 to Nov. 16, 1949 leaving 505 people dead and 466 missing and the one still fresh in everyone’s memory, super typhoon Ruping (International Code Name: Mike), which entered the Visayas and passed over Cebu City on Nov. 12, 1990. Ruping left 748 people dead all over the Visayas and nearly caused the collapse of Cebu’s economy.
These two give us an inkling of what Bagyo sa Doce may have been like. All I remember about Typhoon Rena are the photos of the new but roofless two-story Science Building of the University of San Carlos. But Ruping is another story altogether as I am sure many of you still remember how totally unprepared and caught off-guard the whole of Cebu and the Philippines had been, and how it showed Cebu’s will to rise from the destruction barely months thereafter.
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Belated happy birthday to the first female governor of the 442-year old Province of Cebu, Gov. Gwendolyn Garcia, who turned younger still yesterday. And Happy National Day also to Spain, which marked its Dia de la Hispanidad also yesterday.
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For those who are eager to watch our heritage show “Kabilin” aired at 6:30 a.m and every four hours thereafter over SugboTV Channel 14 on Skycable and other cable companies, a new one just aired last Monday titled “William E. Parsons’ Legacy: The Gabaldon Schools.”