Category: disasters

Marcos cronies and the golden oriole of Isabela

…. Under Marcos, logging licenses and timber concessions were given out as gifts and favors to select family members, close friends, politicians, and supporters. Shared out like a great cake, the forests of northern Luzon were sliced up in unequal portions and distributed to the privileged few. Marcos’ mother, an uncle, a brother, a sister and her husband, were concessionaires to hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest in the provinces of Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya, Aurora, Quirino and Quezon. They installed themselves as board members and shareholders of newly formed lucrative logging companies and timber processing plants….

Rachel AG Reyes

A Bewildering Crash

By Philip Gourevitch 

Flying time from Barcelona to Dusseldorf is an hour and fifty-six minutes—not a long haul—so there’s no reason to imagine that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525, could have anticipated that his commander, Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, would get up and leave him alone in the cockpit, as the captain did, a little more than twenty minutes after takeoff on Tuesday, while the plane, an Airbus 320, cruised over the French Alps. There is no reason to imagine, in other words, that Lubitz could have foreseen, on that route, or on that day, much less in that precise airspace, that he would find himself, without any struggle, in a position to lock himself in the cockpit and take control of the plane, initiating its descent, and continuing to fly it steadily down, down, down over eight minutes that must have seemed to anyone conscious of the trajectory a god-awful eternity, especially after the captain began knocking, then shouting, then pounding at the barred cockpit door—flying down, down out of the sky, down into the mountains, down into death: his death and the deaths of the hundred and forty-nine other souls whose fate he had become.

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MY STORY | Surviving Yolanda and the city of the dead

By Lottie Salarda

TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines — Let me do away with bragging rights first. I can proudly say I am one of the toughest persons on earth after surviving the strongest storm ever to make landfall.

Having said that, I will never forget the glass windows of our station exploding in front of us, as if a bomb had gone off, and then the seawater rushing in, flooding the building as it was then the city around us.

Everyone was in a panic not knowing what to do as we tried to save ourselves.

We swam, held on to anything we could, trying to evade flying debris and crashing waves, painfully pounded by the needle-like rain.

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The ANC Presents-Fail

By Katrina S.S.

THERE is no overstating the fact that on the anniversary of Haiyan what is demanded of us is a reckoning. It should be a time to look honestly at what has been done, what remains neglected, and in what state the survivors have been left. It is a time for truthfully assessing what it was that government did wrong, how – despite insisting that they warned the people of Samar and Leyte about the magnitude of the storm – government itself was unprepared for Haiyan.

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