Filipinas has lived these weeks in an incessant state of preparation, damage assessment and relief operations due to the unusual avalanche of six consecutive tropical storms In less than a month they have left at least 164 muertos, the last of them the super typhoon Man-yiwhose effects continue to be felt this Monday in the archipelago.
Although the Philippines experiences around twenty cyclones a year, experts highlight the persistent frequency of these latest storms, which have occurred relatively out of season and have affected some 10 million people.
“I don’t remember, and I’ve been here for a long time, having seen so many (cyclones) of this intensity“, recently stated the Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., before stating that the climate crisis multiplies the uncertainty and frequency of disasters.
“It’s the new reality we face,” he said.
This is “the first time since records began in 1951 that so many storms coexist in the Pacific basin in November,” the agency said this week. NASAciting the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Marcos stated this Monday that Man-yi o Pepitoas the storm is known locally, left at least a dead and a trail of important material damage in the country after making landfall in the north twice over the weekend.
The death took place in the province of Camarines Nortea region near the island of Catanduanes where the super typhoon made landfall for the first time on Saturday night.
At Catanduanes, Man-yi struck the coast with sustained winds of up to 195 kilometers per hour and left a trail of destroyed houses, uprooted trees, also causing electricity outages, according to several municipal disaster management offices reported on social media.
The storma tropical Tramiknown locally as Kristine, hit the Philippines at the end of last October and is the deadliest of the series of six cyclones that have affected the islands in less than a month.
Torrential rains unleashed a series of avalanches in several parts of the northern island of Luzon, the largest in the archipelago, which completely buried houses, leaving almost 140 muertos and seven million affected.
Just a few days later, on November 2, the super typhoon Kong-rey It again affected the north of the islands on its way to Taiwan.
The authorities of the Asian country point out in their latest balance that the combined effects of both storms left at least 162 dead, 137 injured and 22 missing.
After the storms, and with the Philippine Meteorological Agency (PAGASA) warning of the advance of a new cyclone, politicians and the media denounced failures in the warning and evacuation mechanisms.
He Typhoon Yinxing left one dead and one injured as it passed through the northern Philippines on November 7, according to the Philippine National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC, in English).
After the criticism over the management of previous storms, the authorities began to more forcefully order the forced evacuation of those at risk of flooding.
Toraji, which made landfall in the northern province of Aurora last December 11, and Usagion November 14, they left between them 11 injured. Before Man-yi’s arrival, the authorities evacuated a total of more than 650.000 personas in several provinces, including Quezon City, the largest in the Metro Manila metropolitan area.
In total, the number of people affected by the series of cyclones amounts to more than ten million people, according to figures from the NDRRMC.
“As soon as communities try to recover from the blow, the next tropical storm is already hitting them again. In this context, the response capacity is exhausted and budgets are exhausted,” stated the United Nations representative in the Philippines, Gustavo González, in a statement issued last week.
The six consecutive cyclones have left losses in the country worth 308 million dollars (about 292 million euros), according to NDRRMC figures, with Trami and Kong-rey as the most devastating.
An important part of the damage is concentrated in the vital agricultural sector, with 119 million dollars in lossesaffecting tens of thousands of farmers, which will force the Philippines to import some 4.5 million tons of rice to supply the demand.
(EFE)
