Let's start on that fateful day in September. It was a Saturday so the whole family slept in. At 8 in the morning, my daughter had already gotten up but didn't want to be active yet so she put on a DVD and started watching. To be more comfy, she laid out the sofa bed on the floor. My husband and I were still very much sound asleep. I had spent the day before taking a short "break" from school work thinking I had the rest of the 3-day weekend to study and do my notes. I stayed up the night before until late basking in the brief respite and loving the idea that I could choose to sleep late and wake up late for once.
All of a sudden, my 10-year old burst into the room screaming, "Mama! Mama! It's flooding!" In a stupor, the message did not register right away. What did she mean by flooding? It barely rained the night before. I woke up in the wee hours and yes, it was raining but only then. Flooding in the house?!? Why is she in a panic?! Oh geez! It's flooding in the house!!!
With me up, she proceeded to her Tatay and then Ate Jenny. All four of us promptly started gathering things from the floor up. We raised things, brought them upstairs, put them on top of shelvings and cabinets. No one thought of eating. No one thought of changing clothes.
The water was rising fast. When the water was about the reach the lowest electrical outlets, I decided to turn off the main switch. When it got a little higher, I thought "Oh crap, the car! Geez! It's too late to move it now!" So I just got a plastic bag and tried to plug the exhaust pipe as securely as I could while I shivered in the cold.
We all thought, the last time the waters went really high, the elevated bedrooms were not spared but most of our things there were. So, as the waters went even higher as the morning wore on, we just kept on piling our things higher and higher. My husband recalls have to place the important gadgets onto even higher places at least three times.
The pets were too scared to move and had to be carried up to the rooms. The hamsters, my daughter's beloved pets, had to be brought up as well in their respective terrariums.
By the early afternoon, the water finally reached the elevated bedrooms. It was then that I decided that we had to find a way out. I had shed off the boots that had proven useless and heavy when the water got too high. Still, I went out of the house with the water up to my stomach and looked for a floatation device that could carry my daughter and some of our things. Inside the house, my husband and the girls were packing our things to bring with us. I had heard him tell the girls to pack bags before that and had already packed my scrubs, some underwear, the canned goods and some fruits. No, I did not forget the can openner. And, no, I did not pack any slippers nor shoes. I had packed my netbook but decided to put it in what i thought would be a high enough place for it to be safe, right beside the hamsters.
I found an old wooden door. That would do. I also found an old cooler that could carry bags. At that point, our neighbor, Dina, whose family had shared their home with us in the big flood of 1986 called out to us to move over to their house. They were also calling in the other families in bungalows -- the Quitaligs right across from us and the old Palomares couple. We gratefully accepted the invitation. Jenny and I held on to the wooden door as my daughter sat on it while she held on to the dogs. Joel held on to the cooler with our bags. I could barely feel the street as we crossed over to Dina's house. I hadn't realized it but I wasn't wearing anything on my feet. As luck would have it, a group of four young men came by and helped us cross. They had been going around looking for people who needed help. They cracked jokes and made us laugh as we practically swam.
Joel went back and secured the house. Even then, he wanted to ensure against looters who might take advantage of the calamity. As we settled in Dina's house, he was out there helping people trying to swim to safety. He told the story of the small family who refused to let go of their already submerged motorbike over and over because he was able to persuade them to tie it to our tree so that they could swim freely to higher ground.
The power was down by this time and we were all furiously sending messages asking for help from people we had on our cellphones. People soon complained of running out of load or running out of battery charge. I had resorted to using only one phone to conserve on battery life. A text message I had sent to our class president must have sounded too hard to believe because one of our classmates responded for him and asked me if I was kidding about needing a boat. Turns out, the one who replied lived near our area and was soon on his way home from school after receiving my message. No one else answered. We guessed that the cellphone companies were having problems with the traffic of messages already. We also couldn't make calls anymore-- partly because we couldn't get though and partly because we needed to conserve power.
As the afternoon wore on, we converged at the patio outside one of the rooms. It faced the street. We could see our respective houses go under slowly. We also saw the water turn from just dirty to brown with mud in mid-afternoon. At first, we were making jokes and reminisced about the flood of '86, but as the water became higher and higher, we grew more and more quiet. As we realized that all the work of raising stuff that morning had been for naught and that all our valuables were sinking in front of our eyes, the mood became more pensive. By late afternoon, the mood went into panic mode again. The water was still rising and the second floor of Dina's house was about to get flooded.
After sharing an early dinner, Dina's nephews and sons started to open ways to go on top of roofs so we could hike over to another neighbor's house -- the Losa Tower -- the highest house in the street with three floors. In the dark, we walked on the slippery GI sheets and got to there. We were all wet. Bong, the older of the Losa boys, a childhood friend, welcomed all of us -- more than 30 people. The rained poured on until late that evening. We shared stories, had private prayers said and got to know our neighbors little better.
It's funny, looking back now, that it had to take a calamity for us neighbors to get in touch with each other again.
Based on our experience from 1986, if the rain stopped that night, the water would soon receded and we could probably go back home the next day. So, when the rains did stop at around 10 in the evening of the 26th, we were hopeful. Dina and her boys were able to go back to their second floor early the next morning. To our dismay, the waters stayed high the whole day of Sunday, September 27th.
In the morning of the 27th, however, we had the most welcome surprise-- my brother, along with his brother in law and a son of Mr. Palomares arrived bearing relief goods -- rice, canned goods, mineral water and a fully-charged cellphone.
Though his house was just as submerged as ours, the floods caught my brother with his son and his brother-in-law's family in Ateneo for the grade school family day, while the women of their respective families were in St. Paul Pasig for their family day also. They spent the whole of Saturday in the campus being cared for by the staff. They had tried to reach us but were hampered by the floods and the heavy traffic. They had access to power, food and communication lines but were frustrated because those of us left behind didn't have power nor communication lines and the cellphones were already down to the last bits of power.
My brother's in-laws lived in the house directly behind the Losa's and we all had a reunion when they arrived. Luckily, they too had a second floor that was spared from the floods.
It was quite a sight seeing them arrive. The breeze was cold as we stood on the roof watching the damage being done to our homes. The water current was visible from where we were. It was going East. Floating debris of house parts and tree branches trudged slowly on the murky from Main Street to Marietta Street. All the bungalows in our street only had rooftops visible. And the water level was not going down, at least not fast enough for us.
Through the day, the people in the Losa Tower took care of each other. Water was conserved and food was rationed. No one had any appetite anyway.
The kids seemed to be doing better compared to the adults. MY own daughter asked several times to swim in the flood because "there was finally enough water to swim in." She communicated with neighborhood friends by shouting across the flood while standing on the roof. I dreaded having to tell her about her pet hamsters which be drowned by this time because their terrariums had screen tops that wouldn't let them out, worse, one had just given birth two days before the flood came.
My brother had carried of my cellphone and left his so that he could charge mine and my husband's, along with a couple of others. Family from the states finally were able to communicate with us but only for a few precious minutes. We told we were fine and that nothing could be saved from the house, but they were happy to know we were ok. As mama said, those were just things anyway.
Choppers came by. The first few ones were obviously just trying to assess the situation. The later ones dropped relief goods, but not near us. We frantically waved at them. We tried to get their attention but none gave us any.
While the kids played, the adults sometimes joined them or went about telling stories about the 1986 flood, comparing devastations. I don't remember much of the stories anymore. All I knew was that we were all praying for the flood to subside already. Towards sunset, it had gone down by a few feet and we prayed some more that it wouldn't rain anymore. Thankfully, there were no more rains that night.
As Monday morning came on the 28th of September, the flood waters had gone down even more. Most of the refugees at the Losa Tower decided to thank our gracious hosts and headed to their respective homes. For us, we couldn't go home yet. Standing on the roof of the Losa residence, we could see that the house was still pretty much submerged. The Palomareses and Quitaligs had other houses nearby that they could stay in. Our possible refuge was my brother's home but it too was submerged. Through the kindness of their hearts, the Losas let us stay with them longer than the rest.
As the floods went lower that Monday morning, my brother arrived in his SUV with more relief goods. I asked my brother to take my daughter with him, knowing that she would be in good hands and happy to see her cousins. We bade her a tearful goodbye not knowing when we can tell my brother it was safe and ok for her to come home. After they left, we were finally able to cross the street to go visit the house.
The house was a mess. It looked like a tornado hit the house inside and then a huge mud bomb exploded. Everything was all over the place and browned. We had problems opening the doors which jammed -- the wood had expanded after getting submerged, and things behind it were blocking the way. It was a sorry sight. Looking back, it would have been enough to make me cry but crying was not an option -- there was much work to be done.
It took more than a week for us to be able to clean enough space in the house for us to have some place to sleep in. People helped, thankfully. Relief goods poured in from friends and classmates (who had an Ondoy relief drive for us flood victims -- I have a feeling I was their primary recipient).
Actual clean up for a more liveable house went on for more than a month. Minor cleaning is still on-going. Repairs went on for about two months and they are still unfinished.
And this blog is surprisingly difficult to make. This is not a complete account, of course, but it gives the essentials of what happened. I guess wanting to move on makes me want to go forward and not look back. There was nothing I personally could have done to prevent what happened, so we live on...
