Brian Lord update

[radiofan]

Many have been wondering why we haven't had any new stories from Brian Lord in the past two months.

Brian and his wife were in Vancouver for six weeks from mid August until early October.

The returned to their home in the Philippines ( a couple of hours north of Manila) on October 4th just as the area was being battered by a very destructive typhoon. There had been several storms in the days before Brian and Feli left Vancouver and they had concerns about what the might be going home to (if there still was a home) ..

Here's an update that Brian Forst sent last night:

I got a voice mail from Lord today...I was out when he called. He asked me to contact you or Byth with his situation...he tells me his ISP (internet) has been out since mid September and they tell him it could be back next week but, another typhoon is also expected next week so...

It's been over two weeks since he's been back there now and has had no way, except by phone, to contact anyone. He says there's terrible flooding everywhere with relentless torrential rains which have ruined his property and...caused 4 major dams to break, killed hundreds of people and cattle, put power etc out, caused numerous landslides and even 2 of his neighbours are dead..floated away.

Guess our showers tomorrow aren't that bad.

Brian F

[Russ_Byth]

A number of us were relieved to hear from Brian this morning on their situation back home in the Philippines:

October 31st.

Hi...

Pardon the bulk letter but a lot of people have been writing and receiving no answer.. so this will serve as a reply. The fault has not been mine, it is with Mother Bloody Nature who rent a lot of suffering on the people of this poor country, the Philippines, which is now even poorer and more desitute than ever. My wife Feli and I have been witness to some of it and seen more on the local television coverage which has been quite thorough. Up until today we have had no online service. It was late yesterday when our Service Provider was back in business... the first time in more than six weeks.

For the few who may not know, Feli and I had been in Vancouver on vacation from late August until October 3rd and during the last week of September a typhoon ripped through Manila and it's nearby towns and cities doing all manner of damage and causing hundreds to die and huge property damage. After we arrived home, the country was hit with three more typhoons, the first of which greeted us on the day we arrived.

We were picked up at the airport by the guy we'd hired to meet us at 5AM, Monday morning, 13 hours after we left Vancouver and the flight was on time although some people back in Vancouver were told our plane was delayed. (There is a 15 hour time difference between the Westcoast and us) The driver took us on a route on the ring road that encircles Manila and we saw the garbage that caused the killing floods that we watched on television when the first typhoon struck in late September before we left. As many as ten huge piles of insoluable garbage, food wrappers, plastic, treated cardboard, bottles, tin-cans; 15 foot-high mounds of this stuff at the end of open gutters that run through the eastern part of the city (pop. 20 million). Only pools of water were left on the cement streets. However when we left the city and headed home, north along the freeway it was like driving on a causeway with flooded fields, mostly rice but some vegetable and shrub-farms, on each side of the car for 70 kms.

When we turned off the freeway and drove the surface highway for 30 kms towards our home we were often submerged up to the hubcaps from the water sweeping over the road from the adjacent fields. There was no let up in the flooded farms and in the three towns we passed we could see the water mark on buildings about three feet above the standing water which still lay on the saturated surface. Our place was a little higher elevation and had suffered flooding on the garden but the house was okay; it's raised three feet off the ground.

At five o'clock that afternoon, as we were about to go to bed, we were hit by a second typhoon. It had struck the north tip of Luzon the day before but instead of going off across the South China Sea to China or Vietnam it bounced back and for four days travelled slowly down the West Coast of the Philippines between the inland mountain range and the sea...it's eye just off the coast. The wind had dropped but the rain was torrential and the storm was huge, a hundred kilometers diameter between it's outer bands... it picked up warm water from the South China Sea and dumped it on the entire coast creating mudslides (inland) and flooding (coastal) for 250 kilometers from the north down to 100 kilometers north of Manila about 300 kilometers which included our town. In all, nearly 300 are estimated to have died, twenty in our province (Nueva Ecija) which is inland but a large plain. Four dams -- one a hydro-electric and three irrigation -- either burst of were purposely opened to reduce danger to villages along the coastal plain. Nearly the entire plain was flooded. We had water two feet deep on our property and the rain never let up from afternoon Monday until noon on Friday. The town of Tarlac, (pop: 25,000) 50 kms west of us suffered the same flooding as had Manila a week previously in the first typhoon. Over 50 people drowned, cattle lost and fields flooded, thousands of people homeless.

Ash (the Filipinos call the ash, lehar (lay-har) and it's useless) from the Mount Pinatubo erruption in the 90's has lined the banks of rivers that run from the mountains through the plain to the sea -- it's been there since the volcano errupted. This downpour loosened the ash and it spread over thousands of acres of fields bordering the rivers. It will take several years at least until the fields are usable again.

Pretty little tourist towns along the coast were inundated... motels we'd stayed in were washed away. We watched all this on local television... helicopters were continually flying over us, obviously filming or offering help to stranded people. Further inland the wash from the over-logged mountain chain brought mudslides and some small villages disappeared. It was a scene which you see on TV in places like Bangladesh or Indonesia but I didn't expect to see it here although that was just ignorance on my part.

Another typhoon hit us with torrential rain the second week we were home. We lost our garden but considering what happened to some...

Food has been scarce of course. We've had to do without a lot of things grown here in the PI. What is available is expensive... a bit of price gouging but understandable. Rumors persist about the government, at all levels, keeping money raised and meant for assistance but that's par for this part of the world... and there's an election next year.
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Feli caught a cold and spent a couple of days in bed, passed it on to me and of course with my lung condition it was three times worse. Still only half better. I have a mountain of email here and some of it is from people enquiring as to our situation after seeing the typhoons on TV. I hope this hasn't sounded too dramatic but if it does it's the way it was. Brian.

[mightymouth]

Wow, heavy stuff. Thanks for the update Russ.