Typhoon Tino hit Cebu Province at a time when people were most vulnerable: at dawn. We woke up early, or just a few minutes after the Visayan Electric Company decided to cut the power in our place. This, plus the continuous rain, made Tino’s entry into the province particularly dangerous. The continuous rain ensured the swelling of the waters in rivers and the flooding of many barangays.
Thank God that when the weather bureau placed Toledo and some other southern Cebu towns on Signal 4, my anxiety had already lessened because Tino’s path was already tracked as moving from the Samar area to northern Cebu. That was a bit far from where I live in southern Cebu. In the morning, I spent my time listening to radio dyHP’s Ruphil Bañoc, with particular interest in the report of veteran radioman Paul Lauro.
Paul reported on the rescue operation conducted in some Cebu City barangays like in Sapangdaku, the place where I roamed in during my younger years and whose environs I am familiar with. Sapangdaku is, of course, different from Subangdaku, a barangay in Mandaue City. I remember walking from the upland areas of Carmen town to the upland areas of Cebu City and discovering that, yes, Mandaue does not have a mountain barangay, or one that we could pass through using that side of the Cebu mountain range.
Sapangdaku is a neighboring barangay of Guadalupe, a place I remember fondly as being at the foot of the city’s upland areas. I used to describe its neighbor, Sapangdaku, as being at the hem if one were to consider the city’s upland barangays as a dress. The lower portion of Sapangdaku starts at the river that meanders to the sea and passes by a portion of Barangays Kalunasan, Guadalupe, Capitol Site, Sambag 1 and 2 down to Calamba and the city’s seafront like Barangay Pasil and the Carbon area.
That river was among those that swelled when Tino hit, although I could not say how many houses were built along the banks and how many lives were lost then. I remember crossing that river to Barangay Calamba every school day when I was younger, then walking through the cemetery to the grounds at the back of the Labangon Elementary School and finally to the Cebu City National Science High School campus where I was a scholar before I quit.
My decision to go to Sci Hi was obviously wrong because of the inconvenience. I actually had many choices because I also passed a scholarship at the then Cebu School of Arts and Trade (now the Cebu Technological University), the qualifying exams at the Abellana National School and finally a scholarship at a vocational school in Negros Island. The inconvenience was actually a dilemma also because if I rode to Labangon, I had to ride passenger jeepneys twice (one ride to Colon St. and another ride to Sci Hi).
To save on fare, I walked, crossing the river daily. It was then that I was constantly warned to watch out because the water in the river could swell even if there was no rain in the lowlands but it was raining in the mountains.