So it begins

The first typhoon of the season lashed the northern and eastern part of the Philippines Tuesday night. As I write this, 21 people are known to have been killed and sixty are missing. Basyang (international code name Conson) didn't bring much rain in our part of Quezon City, though I hear that it caused floods in other parts of Luzon. The worst of it in our area was at 4:00PM and it let up just in time to let office workers go home relatively dry. I really ought to have something done about the pathway to our office building—because of the slope of the terrain, it always gets inundated when rains are strong and becomes quite useless as a path.




The winds of Basyang were another matter altogether, however: sustained winds of 120 kph (74 mph) and gusts of up to 150 kph (93 mph). We lost power at home at 11:00PM of Tuesday and I wasn't the only one who had a tough time sleeping that night, not only because of the noise of the howling wind, but because of the fear that I might hear a part of the roof being torn away or a tree falling on the house. This was the scene that greeted me when I got to the office yesterday morning, off to one side of the path above. Power at our house was restored yesterday at 3:00PM, and we are one of the lucky ones. Metro Manila's power distributor, Meralco, estimates that it needs two to three more days to restore power to its entire grid, which also covers much of the island of Luzon. As the colleague of a friend tweeted, "Blackouts, howling winds, heavy rains, falling trees and flying billboards. Welcome to typhoon country, Philippine-style!"