Lacson: The day I thought it snowed

I WAS then an eight-year-old girl playing inside our house when the bright skies suddenly turned grey. I felt a loom inside my heart and a few minutes later, I heard little trickling sounds in our roof. I went outside to see where the noise was coming from, and I felt a deep fear for I saw that it was quite dark as if night has fallen.

The noise started to get louder and we were told to get inside the house. Watching from the window, I saw little rocks pour out from the sky, covering the land with white gray stones and sand. As a child, I couldn't help but wonder and be amazed by what I thought to be snow falling. And then I turned to my mom and asked, "Is it actually snowing here in the Philippines?" My mother shook her head in worry, and answered, "it is an ashfall."

And so I forgot how I came to understand where the ash came from but I vividly remember a picture of what I call the "cauliflower." It was the eruption cloud when Mount Pinatubo erupted on June 15, 1991. It was the last and climactic eruption of Mount Pinatubo which resulted in an ashfall and lahar flows, killing over 800 people and leaving a hundred thousand ones homeless. It is considered as the "second-largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century."

The climactic eruption of Mount Pinatubo on June 15 lasted for about nine hours and caused numerous large earthquakes. As if an insult added to injury, Tropical Storm Yunya or Diding was causing a large amount of rainfall in Central Luzon, causing the ash that was ejected from the volcano to mix with the water vapor in the air. This resulted in a rainfall of tephra that fell across almost the entire island of Luzon. "In addition to the ash, Mount Pinatubo ejected between 15 and 30 million tons of sulfur dioxide gas. Sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere mixes with water and oxygen in the atmosphere to become sulfuric acid, which in turn triggers ozone depletion. Over 90 percent of the material released from the volcano was ejected during the nine-hour eruption of June 15."

The eruption caused a massive setback in the Central Luzon region, with almost "half a billion dollars in property and economic damage." Almost 80,000 homes were destroyed immediately after the June 15 eruption, and some 7,000 more were damaged the year after. These damages were mostly caused by lahar flows. Who will not forget the word "lahar," and the mere mention of the word is bringing me back a lot of fear, worry, and devastation. I remember the feeling of always being on my toes and not being able to sleep in fear that our house will be buried in lahar.

But twenty-nine years after, here we are. We are not commemorating our devastation; rather we are celebrating our rise from the ashes. From this, we have come to be resilient and strong in times of need. Looking at the highly affected areas such as Bacolor and Angeles City, only the buried homes remind us of the tragedy that once affected us. But the people who have come back to where they belong tell us that they have risen above this catastrophe and that the past cannot bring them down forever.

We celebrate as a Kapampangan community who has stood against the toughest test of times, putting the almost gone Pampanga back in the Philippine map. May this always bring us the strength and the will to keep holding on no matter what.