Typhoons again

The tagalog word for typhoon is 'bagyo'.  So it's not entirely surprising that Baguio has been hit by 2 typhoons in the last 3 weeks.  The second typhoon hit and passed over, then reversed up and hit us again, and decided to stick around for a bit.  The filipinos joked that it didn't have fare to travel anywhere, which I assure you, is much funnier in tagalog or ilocano than english.

Typhoon Pepeng absolutely devastated Baguio and the surrounding provinces.  There are landslides everywhere; many many houses are gone; and over 250 people died in Baguio and 2 smaller surrounding provinces.  Our area got completely isolated with landslides on the main roads, and we ran out of coffins and embalming supplies.  There was sinking of up to 10m in some suburbs.  Many other provinces in the lowlands are still underwater.

While I don't have any pictures from the typhoon itself (I decided my camera was not sacrificial), I do have a few from afterwards...

This one is from the absolutely gloriously sunny day after the typhoon- drying clothes.  I don't think I have ever been so glad to wake up and have light pouring into my room.  In fact, during the night it stopped raining, and I actually got woken up by the silence!

  

This is taken after the floodwaters had receded.  Parts of this suburb were 6m underwater when drains were blocked.  Although this looks like an inorganic rubbish collection, those are actually people belongings, which they have moved out of their houses while they are getting rid of the mud.

Ok, a few more serious ones now...  This slide might not look like much, but it took out quite a few houses, and killed at least 20 people.  When I was there, they found another body.  Its pretty heart-wrenching.  

There was a huge, huge slide in an adjoining city called La Trinidad.  I visited yesterday, and it was unbelievable.  Last year I stayed at a house which was RIGHT next to the slide.  In fact, I used to look out the window at the green valley.  It is not green anymore.  Over 150 people died in this one slide.  Most of them were children.  They were still digging for bodies six days after the slide.

Note the two tiny diggers in the photo compared to the size of the slide.  The next one is from a road crossing the slide about two thirds up the last photo.  The tiny black and blue dots in the distance are the army and police digging for bodies.  

And just in case you didn't get the extent of it...

You may see at the end a building on its side.  That was a 3 story apartment building that was further up the valley and got carried along by the mud.

There is just one word to sum it all up.. 'grabe', which means intense/huge/awesome in a negative way.

Grabe.