This is what Gloria Arroyo said in her State of the Nation Address last July:

“As a country in the path of typhoons and in the Pacific Rim of Fire, we must be prepared as the latest technology permits to anticipate natural calamities when that is possible; to extend immediate and effective relief when it is not; the mapping of flood-and-landslide-prone areas is almost complete. Early warning, forecasting and monitoring systems have been improved, with weather-tracking facilities in Subic, Tagaytay, Mactan, Mindanao, Pampanga.

“We have worked on flood control infrastructure like those for Pinatubo, Agno, Laoag, and Abucay, which will pump the run off waters from Quezon City and Tondo flooding Sampaloc. This will help relieve hundreds of hectares in this old city of its age-old woe.

“Patuloy naman yung sa CAMANAVA, dagdag sa Pinatubo, Iloilo, Pasig- Marikina, Bicol River Basin, at saka river basin ng Mindanao.”

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Seeing many areas in Metro Manila turned into an ocean, I remember the 1995 futuristic movie “Waterworld”.

“Waterworld” starring kevin Coster as the mutant mariner (he has webbed feet and gills behind the ears) is about the earth when polar ice caps melted. The earth is submerged in water. The survivors didn’t know that; they thought that somewhere at the end of the vast body of water is dry land.

Among the survivors is a girl named Enola, who doesn’t know how to swim because she had always lived in a place of high altitude, far away from the water.

She is fond of drawing trees which gives an idea of a place she had once lived. She is under the care of Helen, another survivor.

Helen and Enola asked the mariner to bring them to what they referred as “Dryland.”

The mariner disabused their mind about “Dryland” by giving them a tour of the bottom of the ocean. There they saw the earth as prominently represented by New York and the statue of Liberty. There is no dry land, the two are made to see reality.

A group of pirates called “Smokers” are after Enola because the tattoo on her back is supposed to be a map to the dry land.

The tattooed characters looked like Sanskrit. The action in the film is provided in the encounters between the Mariner and the Smokers.

The movie’s ending is Enola, Helen and Mariner finding an uninhabited patch of dry land, which turns out to be the girl’s home.

The movie doesn’t say it but it suggests that it’s the summit of Mount Everest, in the border of Tibet and Nepal, the highest peak in the world at 8,848 meters (29,029 ft) above sea level.

The movie was shown at the time when climate change was still not the buzzword that it is today. Fast melting glaciers have been reported in recent years which environmentalists attribute to global warming.

Weather scientists say that what happened last Saturday when storm Ondoy dumped a month’s worth of rainfall (391.7 millimeters) in just six hours was a manifestation of climate change. We had been seeing signs of it in rains during summer and searing heat during the usually rainy month of July.

I’m thankful that the meeting for the Council of Advocates of the International Visitors Program which was originally scheduled last Saturday morning was canceled the night before. That saved me from being stranded in the storm.

My nephew, who is working in one of IT companies in Global City, called up late evening Saturday that his boarding house was submerged in water and all his things as well as that of his house mates are gone including their cars.

But we are thankful, they were safe. Their landlady sheltered them.

Yvonne Chua, a colleague in VERA Files and her daughter, swam five blocks in New Manila to get her brother who was trapped on the second floor of his townhouse. Yvonne brought kick board for her brother.

There were many areas not considered flood-prone were submerged under Ondong’s onslaught.

That tells us that our disaster-preparation should include having a ready rubber boat, life jacket, and kick board in our house. Rubber boats should now be a must in companies, just like fire extinguishers in buildings.

And, we should all learn how to swim.