Typhoon Basyang

It seems every time my sister overcomes her fear of air travel and visits me on my assignments, nature conspires against her to make each trip more adventurous and memorable.

While it was the forest fires in Utah in the year 2000, which trapped us in Salt Lake City longer than expected, it was yesterday's typhoon “Basyang” hitting Manila.

According to Pagasa, the Philippine weather bureau, my sister should have gotten out of Manila just in time on her 1a.m. flight back to Germany. Little did we know how useless Pagasa’s forecast was. While they still talked about a tropical depression and the predicted the storm to hit way north of Metro Manila, every other weather website and satellite picture clearly showed the eye of the storm was coming straight for Manila.

I already had a weird gut feeling when we said our goodbyes. The wind had picked up remarkably and it started to rain. According to the airline’s website however, all flights were on time. To be honest, I hoped they would not take off during this storm!

Sure enough, soon all flights out of and into Manila were cancelled the hour she was supposed to leave. After electricity went out with a big bang at around midnight, we were not even able to check any online flight schedules and such.

While Anja spent a night at the airport and later at a hotel (the bus ride through the typhoon will surely stay with her forever!), we were busy trying to secure our house and garden from complete destruction.

Wind speeds up to 95 kilometers per hour not only tortured our plants and wind chimes. At their peak even moved and dismantled our outdoor furniture. Time to bring the stuff inside! Equipped with headlamps we tried our best to minimize the damage. After that, all we could do is go back to bed and try to catch some sleep (frequently interrupted by smashing and banging sounds which were hard to locate if coming from our or the neighbors house).

The day after started with an assessment of the damage done. It's amazing how this storm wrecked our backyard! And the whole neighborhood for that matter. Age-old trees broke like toothpicks; concrete power poles did the same.

Chances for the power to come back on any time soon seemed slim. We unearthed our generator and got the hell-machine going to prevent the fridge from defrosting, and to charge phones and laptops.

All these skills a typhoon is teaching! Would I ever have learned which plug needs to go into which socket or which circuit to put the fridge on without frying it (or myself for that matter!)!?

Despite our power-self-sufficiency, we appreciated (and I’m sure our neighbors! Our genny could be heard three blocks away!) that the power came back on later at night.

“Basyang” was a unique experience for Anja but an almost 'normal' event for the Filipinos. It's amazing how this nation, constantly the turf of typhoons and floods, quickly responses to such events by cleaning up and going back to normal daily procedure.