When I was a boy in Cebu, the mountains were already starting to turn bare. I remember the thin green slopes giving way to gray, as trees were cut for timber, and the mountains quarried or turned to upscale subdivisions. Yet storms were few and far between. There was Ruping, a name that still echoes in every Cebuano household old enough to remember 1990. But back then such tempests were rare, almost mythical. They were what economists would call “black swans”: violent, improbable, unforgettable.
Today, black swans have turned white. The extraordinary has become routine. What was once the exception has become the rhythm of our time. Every few years now, a storm like Tino sweeps through Cebu and the island’s wounds reopen. Streets become rivers, rivers become walls and the sea returns to reclaim what the mountains can no longer hold.
Cebu’s geography has always been both its beauty and its burden. A long, narrow island, it rises sharply in the middle and falls quickly into the sea on both sides — a roof with two gutters. When the sky pours, there is little distance between mountain and coast, no room for the water to rest, no time for the people below to prepare.
I remember as a child how we would proudly say that in Cebu, you can drive to the mountain or to the sea in less than an hour. We thought it was proof of the island’s charm and convenience. Little did we know it was a double-edged sword and that the same nearness we celebrated would one day leave us with no space to run when the heavens opened.
In my boyhood, the forest canopy still slowed the descent. The soil was a sponge; the rivers could breathe. But decades of logging, quarrying and dolomite extraction stripped away that protection. What used to take six hours to flood now takes one. The island that once absorbed has learned only to shed.
And the rain itself has changed. A warmer planet means heavier skies; each degree of heat allows the air to hold seven percent more moisture. The same clouds that once sprinkled now empty entire lakes in a day. Even places with billion-dollar defenses like New Orleans or inland cities like Knoxville have been overwhelmed by rains too heavy to process. If those with the best engineering could not escape, what hope has a narrow island whose mountains are bare and whose coasts are paved?
Yet instead of treating the problem as both natural and moral, we reduce it to politics. In the days after Tino, the debate quickly collapsed into finger-pointing over “flood control projects” — who built them, who didn’t, who pocketed what. But floods are not partisan. They follow physics, not party lines. Cebu’s tragedy cannot be explained by drainage budgets alone. It is the sum of years of ecological neglect, poor urban planning and the illusion that every problem can be solved with concrete.
The danger of this myopia is that it blinds us to the deeper wound. Flood control can slow the water, but it cannot heal the land. The real work begins upstream, in reforestation, watershed rehabilitation, mangrove protection and honest governance that does not trade resilience for ribbon cuttings. It demands the courage to think beyond one budget cycle, to value formation over optics and to measure success not by kilometers of canal but by hours of peace after the rain.
When I was young, a storm was a story told for years. You could mark a generation by the typhoon that defined it. Somewhere between Ruping and Tino, time itself disappeared. The interval between disasters shrank. The land no longer had time to dry, the rivers to clear, or the people to heal. That is what climate change truly means for places like Cebu, not only stronger storms, but shorter silences between them.
There is a spiritual grief beneath the physical one. When the rhythm of the land breaks, so does something in us. The rain no longer feels like a blessing; the mountains no longer seem like guardians. Yet even in the ruins, grace still murmurs. The memory of a greener Cebu is not nostalgia, it is prophecy. It reminds us that what was once alive can live again if we have the courage to restore it.
If Ruping was the black swan of my childhood, then perhaps Tino can be our bright sign — the storm that finally taught us what we refused to learn from calm. Because the only way to stop drowning is to remember that safety once grew not from mastery over nature, but from harmony with it.