A Tsunami Experience

It sounded like a thousand motorcycles revving up at the same time. I heard rather than saw the tsunami that caught the Pagadian residents by surprise on that fateful night of 16 August 1976. I was standing on top of an elevated part of the city, confused, alone and convinced that it was the end of the world.

Where is my family?

The night started like any other. After dinner, shared with the other lodgers in a boarding house at Sta. Lucia district in Pagadian City, I slept with the domestic help of my landlady while my husband of three months was out of town on a business trip. At about 12 midnight, I woke up to the feeling of being swayed in a hammock, only this time, I was on our bed. The swaying went on for about five minutes caused by a very strong earthquake. A few minutes later, we rushed our landlady to a nearby hospital as she was showing symptoms of a nervous breakdown. She stayed in the hospital with a relative, and the rest of us went back to the house and tried to go back to sleep.

Less than an hour later, we heard gun shots fired in the air by the citizens’ patrol to wake the people up. They shouted instructions for everyone to go up to a more elevated area because they suspected that, as an aftermath of the earthquake, a tsunami would hit Pagadian. Finding no time to change out of my nightgown, I grabbed a blanket to wrap myself with, picked up my handbag and headed towards a narrow lane adjacent to the house (I was the only one left - the other lodgers already ran out!). I cannot forget the scene that met me when I ran out of the house.

There was pandemonium everywhere…everyone was running along the narrow lane. My slippers got stuck in the mud while I was running but I could not go back for it because people were also running behind me like a stampede of elephants.

Finally, I reached the top of the hill and looked back. It was a beautiful, moonlit night and I could see the water starting to flood the houses below. Around me were parents nervously accounting for their children, children crying for their parents, animals howling.

I looked around and thought, “This must be the end of the world”.

Feeling so alone, and with nowhere to go, I decided to go to the hospital where my landlady was brought earlier that evening. It was within walking distance from where I stood.

I sat by the reception area of the hospital and witnessed more heart-wrenching scenes - crying parents checking the hospital for their missing children, small kids delivered by volunteers who found them without their parents, including two naked, wide-eyed toddlers confirmed to be not related but found hugging each other.

At about 4am, I rang my brother at San Pedro district and asked to be picked up from the hospital. His house was on an elevated area and not affected by the flood. My 71-year old dad, who was staying with my brother on a visit, almost had a heart attack when he learned that I was with the stampede of people fleeing from the tsunami. My dad insisted that I temporarily move in with them while my husband was away, so I returned to our boarding house to get some personal things.

Along the way, dead animals were still lying everywhere while volunteers were busy wrapping the dead human bodies for transport to the overcrowded Roman Catholic Church and the city gymnasium for identification. The funeral parlors were full of bodies, also waiting to be identified.

Our car was delayed by a man who ran amok, obstructing the traffic, when he learned that his wife and children all drowned in the flood.

When we reached our boarding house, a wooden bed was stranded in the front yard, with dead bodies of three children still under a mosquito net. I wonder if they ever knew what hit them, because the tsunami struck while they were sleeping.

It took weeks for the health officers and volunteers to clean up the streets. A week after the tsunami, I saw a wooden raft floating on the river at the back of my brother’s house. A blue cloth was hanging on it, gently swayed by the breeze. As it came closer, I could see that it actually carried the remains of what used to be a human being in a blue shirt. We contacted the health authorities who immediately came to the scene, wrapped the body for identification and burial, and disinfected the area.

The public market building had to be abandoned because of the deathly smell and the market vendors were relocated. A fishing village located in a small island near the city was wiped out by the tsunami and all the residents were reported missing. For months, I did not eat fish as it was rumoured that many dead bodies were washed out to sea.

Memories of what happened that night a long time ago hauntingly came back when a very destructive tsunami wreaked havoc on several Asian countries in December 2004. Although what happened in Pagadian paled in comparison to the massive destruction brought about by the 2004 tsunami, the emotional pain for the lives and properties that perished was just as intense and as hard to accept.

Pagadian is the capital city of the province of Zamboanga del Sur in the island of Mindanao, south of the Philippines. The 1976 tsunami struck all the coastal towns of the province, and Pagadian City ranked as one of those with the most number of casualties.