...then it happened. a storm named xangsane, dubbed 'milenyo' (millennium, i think) locally. it was a howler. cocooned as i am in a fairly windowless office, and insulated from any real-time news (tv or radio), the first inkling i had of an impending storm was from the tv at a place i breakfast at on our office's street. signal number 3, in about three hours. on the way to work, a brief torrent of rain went unremarked by me -- then i saw the news.
forecast winds of 130-160kph, due to hit the metro directly by about 10am. if it continued on it's current track, it would also be the first in 11 years to do so.
called my housemates to secure what they could, and got myself to the office. turns out that the production manager had just sent out a text broadcast that people should just stay home. since we were already in the office, it was probably best to stay put.
however, a recent employee was overlooked in the text broadcast -- he arrived about 9-ish, just as the winds were picking up. so there we were, about 10 in all, at the building door, just watching.
our building faces just a little south of due east, and the winds were predominantly from the north (our left). i haven't quite figured out where that would be relative to the eye of the storm given the counter-clockwise rotation of such things in the northern hemisphere.
standing just outside the door, shielded by the building's corner, the effect of the wind was still tremendous. in the middle of the street, sheets of rain were as horizontal as i've ever seen them.
and then it happened. across the street, there's a building being constructed (where we may be moving in months hence). beside it, by arrangement with a church beside us, is a parking lot for employees of our building. this day, though, everyone had parked on the street itself -- which turned out to be a good thing, as the wind began tearing off the construction's roof sheeting. they were corrugated metal sheets a good 40-plus feet in length (i'm estimating). whole pieces would flutter in the wind, and then get torn off and either speared into the yard of a house downwind, or drop straight into the parking lot, spinning, before crumpling down against the perimeter wall of the village beyond.
those of us with cars moved them beside the church, then moved them again as the church sign was being torn from it's moorings and threatening to fall on the newly moved cars.
all of a sudden, the winds died and that overlong summer heat began to swell back.
amazingly, it was the eye of the storm. never been in one prior to this. after some discussion, it was decided to take refuge in a nearby shopping mall (covered parking for the cars, and shops to loiter in for the meantime). or not. mall security didn't want us to go back in (though we had parked on the other side of the complex) after lunch at mcdonalds, but somehow we got through.
...and the eye passed. with winds screaming through the mall courtyards, we stayed in the darkened mall atrium -- their power provisions apparently were no match for a situation like this.
i'd made the observation that since it took three hours for the wind to reach it's maximum fury, it would therefore be likely that in three hours the storm would have passed. and it turned out to be so.
the aftermath, in our vicinity, was mostly of downed or massively damaged trees; billboards and signage folded to the ground; reports of other buildings in our conglomerate suffering exterior glass failures... our own building had power problems that day: the generator's fan belt had been adjudged defective, and no spares were stocked or even dealer-available. murphy at his best.
personally, me and my officemates who share an apartment nearby also discovered that we had not been spared. at the height of the storm's second onslaught, we received a text message that a roof panel had been torn off our unit -- we had elected to stay put in the mall, however, so we put it out of mind until i insisted that we check after the storm had passed.
oh boy. the largest bedroom had taken a fair amount of water, and there were wet books and dvds and electric fans...
good thing that the landlord allowed us to move to an unused unit in the aparment row while the roof and the electricals were going to be sorted out. i certainly would prefer not not move back with wet wiring.
...took almost a month before we moved back.
herewith are the only two shots that it occurred to me to take with my phonecam:
they're from the central courtyard of the alabang town center mall, after the storm had passed.
for more info on the storm, here's a link to wikipedia...
xangsane on wikipedia
