UP Resilience Institute Executive Director, Dr. Alfredo Mahar Lagmay, was interviewed for One News PH’s “The Medyo Serious Talk Show with Red Ollero” regarding Disaster Preparedness. Dr. Lagmay recounts how he is taken to disaster sites in order to survey the damage done and gather data and often taken notes that if the people affected had been prepared or had better technology available to them, then there would have been no disaster in the first place. Him and his team also used their time on the affected site as an opportunity to test equipment, such as the installation of new rain sensors. These devices quickly proved their worth, by allowing them to quickly identify flooding ahead of time. This exemplifies his point, that new technology has value in saving lives such as in search and rescue. Forensic analysis was also valuable, to find the cause of the disaster and the mistakes made before it that should be rectified afterwards.
Dr. Lagmay further re-iterates how storms with an intensity that occurred only once every one hundred years are now occurring with a frequency of only one in ten years. The annual cost in damages from these storm hazards is over 10 Billion (10,000,000,000) pesos. This acceleration in intensity means we can no longer rely solely on historical data. The role of the UP NOAH Center has been important in reducing human casualties thanks to improved preparedness, with a reduction in annual fatalities even as annual damage to property has increased, which means that fewer people have died despite storms becoming more frequent and more damaging.
One of the means by which this was achieved was by the use of computer modeling to accurately predict a worst case scenario rather than relying solely on historical data. This use of Probabilistic Risk Assessment leads to better preparedness against storms that may be worse than any storm on the previous records. In one such case, the evacuation centers had been placed 400m away from the coastline, in accordance with the historical record, but during typhoon Yolanda the flood had reached up to 2km inland and inundated the center. This was the same story that was repeated earlier during Typhoon Ondoy, with many people whose houses were washed away exclaiming that they had never experienced such intensity before. This highlights the need to use more.