Typhoon Frank formally ushered in the 2008 season of death and destruction, which came early this year, as the more cataclysmic storms, according to PAG-ASA, usually occur during the latter half of the year. And they hardly ever hit the areas of the Visayas where they did the most damage. Frank was a freak. This simply means that the worst is yet to come.

I didn’t mean to make light of the suffering of thousands when I made what seems to me now as a frivolous post during the time Frank was still pummeling Luzon. I must have been giddy with relief at having been spared by its brutal fury. Now I have survivor guilt and seek to make amends by making what I hope to be a serious, even solemn, post.

I have previously written about what Prof. Randy David calls our “disaster threshold” and how poverty is a major factor which prevents the majority of our countrymen from shielding themselves from the worst effects of these devastating events. Poverty and political opportunism.

Our disaster threshold as a nation is extremely low, such that we suffer much from every visiting calamity and we recover ever so slowly.

Poverty is what makes people live on the slopes of active volcanoes or build their shanties on the banks of powerful rivers. Poverty compels people to ignore the risks they pose; political opportunism makes politicians close their eyes to the dangers to which their constituencies expose themselves.

Valid points, but I would like to add another element to this equation. The greed of certain individuals or corporations compound the tragic effects of natural calamities such as Typhoon Frank. Greed and its handmaidens, negligence and indifference. Greed led the owner of the MV Princess of the Stars to allow it to proceed on its final journey despite storm warnings. This is the same corporation which owned the even more ill-fated Dona Paz, a ship whose loss on December 20, 1987 killed nearly three times as many as the famous Titanic. The Dona Paz has the sad distinction of being the worst peacetime maritime disaster in history.

Initial reports say that the ship suffered engine trouble and with its engines gone, it could not escape from Frank’s murderous path. The apt phrase commonly used is “dead in the water”. This was certainly the ultimate fate of many of the ferry’s passengers. The ship was buffeted by strong waves which caused it to sink off Sibuyan Island , a stroke of belated luck which may have saved hundreds of lives. Its proximity to the cluster of islands in the Romblon area allowed survivors to swim or drift to safety.

How could this happen again after Dona Paz, you say ? After all, typhoons hit the country with numbing regularity. Yet nobody seems to have foreseen or at least sought to minimize the tragic effects of this catastrophe just waiting to happen. What is undeniable is the simple fact that the numerous deaths resulting from such events are as much man-made as they are caused by nature. We, as a people, seem to have surrendered to a culture of disaster , built up by poverty, political opportunism and greed. We accept as inevitable consequences which can be prevented or at least mitigated. The Belmont Club makes this chilling observation:

Today more than 800 people are missing as a ferry sank after it sailed into teeth of the worst typhoon of the season. The Scotsman reports:

Sulpicio Lines, the owner of the MV Princess of Stars, put the number of people missing to 845 after discovering an extra 100 passengers on the ship’s manifest. Only 28 people were last night reported to have survived the disaster and they said many did not make it off the ship in time. … “Many of us jumped, the waves were so huge, and the rains were heavy,” a survivor identified only as Jesse told local radio. “There was just one announcement over the megaphone, about 30 minutes before the ship tilted to its side.

Everything about the disaster, from the shambolic nature of the ship’s manifest, the negligence of the Coast Guard, the indifference to the weather report, the casual way in which the order to abandon ship was given — one wonders why they bothered at all — is redolent of the culture of disaster. Although some might be forgiven for imagining that there might be some correlation between seamanship, material condition, Philippine Coast Guard corruption, weather and ship sinkings — that one might lead to the other — those thoughts are alien to the Philippine bureaucracy. What will be uppermost in their minds is how the party will go on; how the bribes should continue. Those are the eternal things. And as to the perils of sea, well, bahala na. All memory of the MV Princess of Stars disaster, like that of MV Dona Paz, will leave as little trace upon Philippine shipping practices as a thrown stone leaves upon the face of the waters. Eight hundred people, half the Titanic, gone. Just like that.

Gone, just like that. And what are we going to do about it? Not a damn thing, if we run true to form.

In the meantime, as I have said before, the dead lie unburied and orphans wail inconsolably in the night. And the living are, in a sense, even worse off than the dead. They have the burden of going on in the face almost incomprehensible loss.

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