By Prof. Rolando Borrinaga
BiliranIsland.com
(During two Green Education Workshops in Ozamiz and Iloilo last June, my lectures included a narrative on the buhawî phenomenon. In the wake of yesterday’s flooding in eastern Biliran, I re-issue here what I had said about this matter.)
On March 11, 2011, a Magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan triggered tsunami waves that struck Tohoku Prefecture and killed thousands of people and destroyed many buildings and public infrastructures, including roads and railways. It also caused a meltdown in a nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, which led to the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents to safe zones (en.wikipedia.ord/wiki/2011_Tohoku_earthquake_and_tsunami).
The Maria Benita Promenade in Masagongsong has been washed out. Its riprap destroyed. Passage way is along the side. Photo by Jalmz Rolando Borrinaga — at Biliran Island.
Global focus on the Japan disaster virtually overshadowed a disaster that struck Tacloban and nearby towns on the night of March 16, less than a week later. Satellite images at the time showed massive monsoon rain clouds from the Pacific Ocean being stalled for days over Eastern Visayas skies by a cold front in the west. These poured waters overnight and caused massive flooding in Tacloban and nearby areas. Some old folks in Palo town recalled that the last event of such kind that flooded the poblacion happened in the early 1960s or 50 years before.
In Tacloban itself, a landslide killed at least seven people and about 80% of its barangays were inundated by floodwaters. I live in a part of a subdivision in the city that is most flood-prone, and the water was about two feet deep from the street level. At our living quarters inside the house, we waded in about eight inches of floodwaters at its highest, although this gradually subsided until the elevated floor became waterless five days later. In my reckoning, that was the biggest flooding experienced by Tacloban in decades, and perhaps in a century. It also proved to be my early rehearsal for the coming of Supertyphoon Yolanda more than two years later.
The old folks attributed the March 2011 Tacloban flooding to buhawî, a phenomenon that we all had heard of. But this is something that does not get reported on radio, and especially on TV and newspapers, unless the reporter had witnessed a waterspout, something like a tornado, with its corresponding destruction. This is the popular understanding of buhawî, also the only description found in many Philippine dictionaries. But, in fact, there is a more common but ignored aspect of this phenomenon that was described in 1668 by Jesuit Fr. Francisco Alcina, who noted the waterspouts (mangas) in two forms: “one draws the water from the sea and carries it up the clouds; the others pour out and discharge themselves. Both make a noise like a great boiling of water” (Alcina 1668, Part I, Book 2, Ch. 13). An Augustinian missionary in the 1770s supplied the Spanish word aguacero, which translates to English as “cloudburst” (Artigas 1914, 133). In buhawî as cloudburst, rain water simply pours down from the sky in torrents, at times like a bombshell whose explosive impact on mountainsides and uplands, mistaken for rolling thunder, can cause landslides and flashfloods.
The tragic Ormoc Flashflood in Leyte in November 1991, which killed more than 5,000 people, was also attributed by local folk wisdom to buhawî cloudbursts in its mountains. But this perceived cause did not find its way in the published reports, because no one could tell the journalists that they saw tornado-like waterspouts.
