Tropical Storm Washi caused widespread flash floods throughout the Philippines
The typhoon in south-east Asia dumped a month's worth of rain in just 12 hours on Friday, smashing homes and bridges, uprooting trees and carrying vehicles off in the torrent. The storm moved slowly out to sea yesterday, but more than 35,000 people flocked to hastily erected evacuation centres. An entire army division - some 10,000 soldiers - are involved in the rescue efforts around Cagayan de Oro, and many people are still missing.
During the peak of the rain, the water rose to about 11 feet (3.3m) in just a single hour. The Philippines are struck by about 20 major storms every year but most of them take a more northerly track, hitting Luzon island.
What was the real cause?
Lack of flood warning combined with darkness are partly to blame for the high death toll. Officials have also acknowledged that illegal logging and mining contributed to the storm's damage since there were fewer trees to hold water and prevent erosion.
Philippine Federal Environmental Official Nereus Acosta stated:
"We can really see how vulnerable we are. When you tamper with the watersheds and the forests, we become vulnerable."
This is an all to clear reminder that anthropogenic change of not just the atmosphere, but land can have devastating effects. More on the story can be found here.
I didn't follow this event when it happened (just read the headlines). I'll just go with what I read in this post and in the later post.
ReplyDeleteThe Environmental Official of the Philippines has blamed the floods on illegal logging and mining and has tampered with the watersheds and the forests, thus increasing the vulnerability to floods. But just looking at the picture you put up in this post, it seems like they also didn't have the proper infrastructure, like drains and canals, to carry away the water in case of a flood. And I think, that may actually have been the main problem and cause of flash floods.
And also, I just skimmed through the post after this, but it seemed like this monsoon's intensity wasn't out of the ordinary? please correct me if I'm wrong!
Hi Wei. You're right in that a lot of the damage caused by the monsoon was as a result of land use change (which affected run-off rates and water getting to main river channels more quickly) as well as poor infrastructure. And you are also correct in saying that the monsoon wasn't out of the ordinary in terms of the amount of precipitation and its duration. However, the main difference is that it struck a part of the Philippines which isn't on the 'normal' pathway for cyclones.
ReplyDeleteThis is again a reminder that using fatalities and amount of destruction is a poor indicator in the intensity of weather events and how 'extreme' they are. With population increase and the rapid rise in land use for settlements and industries, we can expect that weather events such as these will only create more damage, as the are more likely to hit inhabited land.
Many uncertainties still lie over changes in monsoon patterns with anthropogenic climate change, with current results from the IPCC suggesting that they may even remain essentially unchanged. All that can be certain from this event is that humans were at fault for much of the damage and destruction caused by this weather event due to miss-management of the surrounding land and catchments.