Squint eyeing a storm

It was a bold idea at the time. Supertyphoon Chaba was approaching. Prelude before landfall appeared tame, and uncharacteristically dry. Filipino house helpers, sporting the cultural trademark of bahala na, anshala, what-will-be-will-be attitude, lingered around past morning Mass or Sunday worship service, intuitively in no hurry to batten down the storm boards at their employer’s houses. So, why not grab a six-pack, take a heavy duty raincoat, bundle some warm pullovers, waterproof the digital camera, pouch nuts with jerky meat and apples, head up to Mt. Tapochao to have a close encounter with threatening mother Nature, and scoop a feature article for the paper in the process?

Thank God, I got weak-kneed! When she howled ashore, the savagery of Chaba was not to be trifled with. Up our second floor apartment, I was bailing water off our living room floor at two o’clock in the morning. With electricity going off earlier, I was awakened by the implausible noise of overflowing water out of the kitchen sink. CUC had outdone itself, I thought, to bring us water at the height of a typhoon. Turns out, the neighbor’s cable wire wrapped itself around the drainage exhaust vent and snapped the lid off. Water on the roof brought tar-black dirt down the pipe, only to be denied passage by a backed up sewage system. Gushing like a fireman’s water hose, the kitchen and the living room instantly converted into a pool.

With no place to dump water save outside, I foolishly opened the front door as Chaba roared her 185 mph fury, flapping the door screen like Cinderella’s stepmother’s fan at the Prince’s ball. Miraculously, the hinges held. With visibility nil two feet beyond one’s nose, buckets of water got pitched into the raging rain to join heaven’s thunderous grief. Resigned and frozen in her despair, my dear wife just curled herself into a fetus position. Helplessly, she watched water squirt into the bedroom from what we thought were water sealed thick glass windows. With the winds crescendoing like the percussion section of the 1812 symphony, she was alarmed that the glass would shatter. The superstorm would burst into our remaining domain. She feared for safety and sanity.

Two hours later, spent like a sophomore at a Yucatan spring break orgy, I crawled into my frightened wife’s corner, smelling of the unclogging chemical poured down the drain during a brief respite from the sky’s unrestrained tear ducts. Notwithstanding my environmentalist heart’s dismay over the amount of toxic compound I poured down the pipe, the roof water audibly rushed down the unclogged drains.

The morning light saw the predictable river down Msgr. Martinez Rd. from the Msgr. Guerrero Rd. intersection. Boulders twice the size of bowling balls languorously rolled down the street. Kannat Tabla debris came down to park along the STS buses whose terminal gave up momentarily its customary tidiness after Tingting left periodic overcast skies that continuously formed waterways off this section of the island’s water runoffs and drainage system.

Forty-eight hours later, after one more of CUC’s cracking sleep-deprived radio voice assuaging the public that the linemen were furiously working to bring back power and water, I finally got out of the house to squint-eye whatever Chaba left in its wake. I stopped counting uprooted trees after 200. Electrical posts that snapped like matchsticks were next but it quickly gave way to counting crumpled corrugated tin roofs clustered at community corners.

Garment workers came knocking at our door inquiring of apartments for rent. Occupants of the affected newly proliferating tin-roofed dwellings hastily built to respond to rising demand, had either moved into public shelters, or were desperately huddling with other makeshift dwellers who could not turn away the pleading homeless garment factory worker, drenched lawn service and farm personnel, or roofless visitor service staff.

Is there a point, to this narrative? Well, there is but it is about a storm of a different calibration. Or more accurately, several brainstorms of varying intensities. One came after conducting an ocular survey of San Vicente Elementary School where I teach. Accustomed to the sights of chocolate colored floors at the Administrative offices, Teachers’ Lounge and classrooms each time more than a trickle runs off from the school parking lot, it became obvious that the time for some common sense brainstorming has reached a critical point. Convening a group of concerned parents, teachers, officials and citizens in the neighborhood is patently in order. It is time to check the master school grounds and facilities plans. We need to transcend the TT tin-roof transitory planning methodology that seemingly went into our public school designs. Even the 21st century mode of planned obsolescence will do. At least, there is an element of intentionality.

It is also time to look at a contour map of Saipan, identify the natural ponding sites, mark areas where contouring of the terrain might be appropriate, extend the absorptive capacity of the land with additional arbor, and zigzag waterways to delay water flow from the ridge line to the shore? (Perhaps, the Corps of Engineers had already done this.) While we’re at it, let’s dig up the old zoning legislation and get some land use rationale to this 12-by-5-miles habitat of ours.

One storm I’m squinting at is the Gateway plan of NMC. The plan is bold and imaginative. It provides the longed for paradigm shift on the manner NMC images itself, its operations and its services. Chaba ripped off a few tin roofs and suspended classes for a week. A blessing. The obvious became manifest. The College needs new facilities!!! This has been a consensus for a long time. In 1997, I saw designs at the U.S. Commerce Dept. in Honolulu for a proposed campus on Tourism. It is time to consign As Terlaje tin roofs to the annals of TT history.

La Fiesta Mall was targeted for NMC occupancy. Governor Juan N. Babauta kick-started the acquisition. The business community demurred. Legislators hesitated. The peanut gallery carped. Now, allegations had been aired that the Gov’s family benefited from the lease arrangement. Absence of transparency in the process is claimed. I say, “If you smell a crime, take it to court. If you wish to grandstand, spare us the holier-than-thou attitude. Might want to check first the dirt under one’s fingernails before casting the first aspersion. One need not shut up, but for heaven’s sake, get on the program.”

I am reminded of a sign I once saw at a Town Meeting. It said: “Those who claim something cannot be done are often rudely interrupted by someone doing it.” To NMC administrators and the Governor, I have six folding chairs that the drenched Procurement and Supply Office can use should they move to La Fiesta Mall this week. Will locate some more, much more, for classrooms. Let’s quit whining and get on with the program!

Another storm looms on the eastern horizon. I think I just developed a permanent squint.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School and writes a regular column for the Saipan Tribune.