"We need a Department of Disaster Resilience more than ever."
Supertyphoon Rolly made landfall on the Bicol Region early Sunday morning. Its wind and rain are pummeling parts of Luzon island, including Metro Manila, as of this writing. We have yet to see the extent of damage it is bringing. It is a near-certainty that the final toll will be heartbreaking.
The onslaught of the typhoon also occurs at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much a threat to our country. This makes us fear for the conditions of those who are temporarily or permanently displaced, waiting for the storm to pass in evacuation centers, on higher ground. During times like this, practicing social distancing could be the last thing on people’s minds. Exposure to the elements will also certainly breed illnesses and weaken people’s immune systems against COVID and other diseases.
Given all these, talk of the establishment of the Department of Disaster Resilience has once again surfaced. The aim is to create a body dedicated to the management and mitigation of disaster risk. Given the number of disasters, natural and man-made, that challenge Filipinos every year, it is only right that a dedicated institution – instead of the ad hoc gathering of representatives from each department of government every time there is a disaster – come up with strategies and action points even before the disasters come.
President Rodrigo Duterte has already certified this bill as urgent, and both Houses of Congress have filed bills to this end. In the last Congress, the House of Representatives was able to pass the DDR bill; the Senate, not quite. What was the real reason for the failure? Were the provisions in the law that were not acceptable to our senators? Were there enough consultations with stakeholders? How can these concerns be addressed to achieve consensus and so that we could pass the bill this time around?
Alas, in the face of the storm, we have to put these bureaucratic concerns aside to focus on the immediate needs of our fellowmen. We have no time today to think about the failure to act for the long-term. Whether the existing law is weak, and why a stronger bill has not been passed – all these will have to wait another day.
As always, immediate prevention, relief and rehabilitation are the arena of local government executives. It is the local officials who are aware of the specific risks and conditions faced by their constituents. It is they who are in the thick of the action in helping their people cope with the devastating effects of disaster.
Resilience could either be virtue or vice. It could be seen as a virtue when used the context of refusing to be brought down by challenges. It could be a vice when mistaken for mere tolerance or fatalism, accepting only what is there and being content with incompetence and apathy.
Like many times in the past, Filipinos will get through this test. Let us just make sure we gain something from what we see at the height of the storm, before sunny days make us forget how much harder we have to work on being resilient.