Pedring 2011: Rain, Flood, Power Failure, Mobile Network breakdown, and Social Media

On September 25, 2009, Typhoon Ondoy lashed Metro Manila and plagued it with wind, rain, floods and power failures. Mobile networks (mainly Globe) went down, causing communications breakdown. And social media took center stage as people plugged into the networks, reporting news, finding news, generating Tweets, Facebook updates, sharing media, and creating homespun disaster reporting networks.

On September 27, 2011, in an eerie coincidence almost two years to the date, practically all of the above repeated itself, only this time the typhoon was called Pedring.

Roxas Boulevard covered with water - Twitpic by @itsmechiniego

Once again, I got all of my news through digital social media, through SMS, on mobile internet, and on the social networks. Very early in the morning, the office sent an SMS broadcast to all employees – no need to go to work today, just stay home, and stay safe. What’s going on, I asked, how is everybody? Years ago, I would stay glued to AM radio and the TV news channels. Nowadays, I bring up the Twitter app on my phone and scan the feed. Why wait for commentators and news anchors? Social media is more immediate.

Twitter, Facebook, joined this year by Google+, all served as the primary source of information by the digital generation. Trees knocked down in the neighborhood? Rooftops whizzing by? No mobile phone service in your area? Power down? Is it flooded where you are? People took to reporting the news by themselves with a speed that professional news organizations struggled to match.

Certain incidents stood out as we monitored the people-powered newsfeeds. Roxas Boulevard is flooded! Check the Twitpics and the YouTube clips for confirmation.

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Billboards crushed cars on Buendia! There’s a YouTube clip for that.

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The Sofitel Hotel got flooded! The Sprial restaurant – site of many a memorable buffet dinner – was under water. Proof? There’s a Twitpic or Yfrog photo for that:

Here’s a photo of the flooded Sofitel (posted on Yfrog by Jerick Bautista, hotel employee):

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Here’s another photo by Jerick Bautista of the floodwaters swamping the back of the Sofitel Hotel.

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There was the inevitable meme. Floods everywhere, hey did anyone inform Christopher Lao? Was he informed? And just like that, Christopher Lao trended once again on Twitter for a brief spell.

Hey how could we help? Check out the Philippine Red Cross Twitter feed for details.

As in Ondoy, DIY crowdsourced disaster reporting mechanisms popped up, allowing people online to report critical areas needing help. The best one I saw was the Typhoon Pedring Crisis Map on Crowdmap.com. It even has a handy list of Emergency Hotlines .

And then there were the commentaries.Two years after Ondoy, did we learn anything new? Are we more prepared for disasters than before?

When the worse of the typhoon was over, I suddenly remembered I had a television set. I turned it on to ANC. The 24-hour news channel was rehashing all the info, reports and video clips I had already seen on social media sites.

The best Typhoon video coverage wasn’t captured by television news crews: it was uploaded on YouTube, shot by ordinary people on phones and small cameras.

At what point did the idea of a 24-Hour TV News Channel get so outdated?

Pedring: The Return of Christopher Lao on Twitter

For a brief moment at the height of Typhoon Pedring on September 27, mentions of Christopher Lao reappeared on Twitter , bringing the punsters – and the finger waggers – back out in the open. The term trended on Twitter for a brief moment, before receding and letting the more general #Pedring reign as a trending topic.

It’s Getting Hot In Here

Here is my contribution to Blog Action Day (October 15). This year’s theme is Climate Change.

I came late into the whole global warming consciousness thing, and it came by way of Hollywood, and partly via science fiction.

The notion of a world ravaged by either a nuclear holocaust, a biological disaster, or an environmental catastrophe was a formula and a post-modern speculative fiction staple. Inevitably this would involve a man who had miraculously survived all that and was chased by aliens, mutant zombies or intelligent apes.

And that man was usually Charlton Heston. And in later times, he was usually Will Smith.

But the notion of the environmental disaster producing something more menacing than zombies had not occurred to me until The Day After Tomorrow, a film much pilloried in its day for its cheesy acting and story line, and much praised for its spectacular special effects. The key horror in this film was global warming induced climate change that proceeded at a breakneck pace. In a matter of days, a series of unfortunate climate events had conspired to bring a slew of storms and blizzards that led to a new ice age.

Real weathermen and climatologists deemed that speed to fast, too fantastic, and laughed it off as a silly film. But the prospect of a climate gone mad due to a line up of disturbances struck a chord in me, and I wondered if it could all really happen.

The second film that made a tremendous impact, is of course the documentary based on Al Gore’s “The Greatest Keynote Presentation that ever lived” – An Inconvenient Truth. In the film, Gore seemed like quite an affable presenter, cris-crossing the world delivering his slide show on global warming. The film’s main thesis was that excessive C02 buildup caused by our burning of fossil fuels and the decline of the world’s forests was causing global warming and the end result would cause the climate to change.

On paper, a film about a guy giving a slide show sounds like a dull premise, and yet I mark this documentary us as one of the most frightening films of all time for the message it delivered. That we had gone so far, so fast, in putting the world on an auto-pilot to destruction.

One of the key sequences in An Inconvenient Truth showed the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans in 2005. The floods, the levees breaking, the looting, the survivors on rooftops, the failure of government relief agencies to respond – all would be replicated in 2009 in the Philippines with the floods due to typhoons Ketsana and Parma.

These typhoons came at us with atypical strength – Ketsana would dump more rain in Metropolitan Manila than had been experienced since 1967, 42 years ago. Parma was likewise atypical, pouring more rain into the northern part of Luzon island than could ever be remembered. In both cases, the water level at dams and reservoirs rose to record heights. While the levees did not break, as in the case of Katrina, water was voluntarily released by government officials to prevent the dams from breaking. And the results proved devastating – much wider in scope than Katrina.

In the mountain ranges of Benguet, the constant rains fell on slopes denuded by deforestation, causing massive landslides that killed entire communities and isolated towns and cities.

In the news coverage, Philippine weathermen from the national weather agency Pag-Asa struggled to find a clue for all this. And the dreaded “C” words were offered as the cause. Climate Change, they said. Climate Change is the villain. Not us.

Ridiculous. By now, we know who is truly responsible for Climate Change.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly (of the comic strip “Pogo”) gave us the correct bogeyman for all of this. In the 70′s he wrote. “We have the met the enemy, and he is us.”

When looking for the root cause, look no further.

Blog Action Day Against Global Warning: Oct 15

We just signed up to support World Blog Action Day 2009 on October 15. This year’s theme is to bring awareness to the problem of Global Warming.

On this day, participating blogs from around the world will be creating and posting blog posts to highlight the biggest challenge posed to mankind today – the issue of climate change. In the Philippines, the two major typhoons that ravaged our country in 2009 – Ondoy and Pepeng – have already been publicly declared by the leading local meteorologists to be quite possibly a direct result of global warming induced climate change.

Here’s the Blog Action Day web site, which tells all.