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Deciding on our own Typhoon Signals with Typhoon Basyang

Posted On July 14, 2010

So Typhoon Basyang finally made it’s run through the streets of Metro Manila, dead on target.  Initially it was headed for Isabela, but changed course from West North West to just West.  Straight towards Quezon Province and into Rizal Province, into Metro Manila.  My wife and I decided on our own if we were sending children to school, or if we were evacuating Marikina for higher ground.  Now that we have the internet and with the PagAsa website updated every 1 hour, we could now make our own decisions.  This is how it happened…

Tuesday 5am I woke up and surfed to www.pagasa.dost.gov.ph and looked at where the storm was.  I saw that the storm had changed course and was now headed straight for Metro Manila.  My wife and I checked the online local newspapers and ABS-CBN News but they were still reporting the 11pm forecast.  Even the PagAsa website still had the 2am forecast.  By 6 am another updated satellite picture and by 7am another updated sattelite picture.  My wife and I decided it was time to take action.

We decided on not sending the children to school.  By 6am in the PagAsa website it showed signal #1  in the Province of Rizal and Bulacan, that is the area where the new Manila Waldorf in Timberland is located.  So this automatically means school is out.  No need to wait for the department of education, they are just getting up from bed.

We decided we were going to evacuate Marikina for higher ground.  We were going to sleep at the Condominium in The Fort with the in-laws on the 8th floor.  This was the very first time the drainage system will be tested in Marikina after the Ondoy flood last year.  We waited until my wife’s car was safe from the number coding scheme and at 10am, we left for higher ground.

I went to my office and did my office work.  Kids stayed indoors in the condominium.

How did Typhoon Basyang perform?  There was a good amount of rain in Quezon City around the area of Quezon Avenue and EDSA around 6pm.  I woke up around 1am to howling winds.  Seemed like we were near the eye of the storm. My 2nd boy also woke up and was watching and observing and listening to the howling wind, put his hand outside the window curious.  Until his mom called him back to sleep.  By 3am the howling had died down and I went back to sleep.

The following morning I asked our driver who stayed in Marikina how the storm went.  He said the water level in the streets covered the side walk and into the first step of our gate.  That would mean 7 to 8 inches of water on the street in front of our house with just this minuscule storm.

It is apparent that the drainage system needs to be re-bored or improved somehow to handle the big typhoons, those typhoons that bring rains 3 days to 2 weeks straight.  This means we have to evacuate with each and every storm that comes.  We will get better at it.

Now in the media they are finger pointing who is to blame as to why the prediction was wrong about the path of the typhoon.  Most people were calm about the typhoon hitting north.  They did not see it on the news on radio or television that the typhoon was coming our way directly in Metro Manila.

I know why.  I observed that the satellite images are automatically updated every hour. But the commentary pages are updated only periodically manually by whoever is in charge.  For example the 2am forecast path remained that way until maybe 8am.  We noticed that.  We did not depend on that.  When we saw the disparity between the 2am forecast and 5 and 6am satellite pictures, we made our own conclusion.  Actually PagAsa updates the storm signals per province every hour, it was the commentary with sketch that is periodically updated… this is the “official word” the media outlets were looking to parrot.

Some suggestions for PagAsa:

1. When there is a storm, have the commentary updates updated every 1 hour.

2. Host the website of PagAsa mirrored out of the Philippines to a remote web server with automatic fail over.  I can do that for you for a fee.  By 2am the Pag Asa website was down in the middle of the storm.  There was a Luzon wide blackout.  My sun broadband was down but my globe broadband was still useful.  If there was a remote server, then people in need of news would still have seen a live pag-asa website.

3. Of course higher pag-asa website capacity, I can provide that too.

Until the next typhoon.  Best wishes to all.