New York, the city that never sleeps, is devoid of people on the streets today. People are home, nervously boarding up windows and stocking up on bottled water and canned goods in preparation for Hurricane Irene. I’m not so sure what to make of the situation myself, as I come from a place where typhoons occur on a regular basis and week-long class suspensions aren’t unusual. I’m a tempted to say that shutting down the train (for the first time in over 100 years) and pre-hurricane evacuations are a little over the top, but then I realized that this is what sets places like the U.S. apart from developing countries such as the Philippines. The only thing is that I wish my country could afford to be paranoid, but we don’t have the resources to de-clog streets and prevent floods, much less evacuate millions of people who refuse to be displaced.

With all these hurricane-related thoughts, I dug up an essay I wrote for the Inquirer right after Typhoon Ondoy:

Thoughts from a half-submerged house 
By Bianca Consunji
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Last updated 07:27:00 10/03/2009
“I’M NOT so sure, but I think I just saw a turtle swim past me.” This was the first thing I told a friend when I called him up.

“Where are you?” he asked. “Get back inside your house!”

“I am inside my house,” I replied. “I’m knee-deep in water, and it’s looking worse every minute. That turtle that just swam by is from our fishpond outside.”

“What?” he said, stunned. “Then why are you even talking to me now? Go somewhere safe!”

“Right now, the house is the safest place for me. I’ll die if I head out in this weather,” I said. “And to be honest, things are so terrible, I just saw a frog ramming desperately on our window, trying to get shelter from the storm.”

Last Saturday started like any lazy, rainy Saturday – I woke up late, read the papers, had a leisurely breakfast, and checked Facebook and Twitter for updates. The updates were playful at first; “Mmm, staying in to enjoy the bed weather,” wrote one contact. But as the morning wore on and the downpour got heavier, the messages on my news feed took a worried tone. “Bed weather to bad weather” eventually became “Hey, the rain is really becoming scary,” and finally, “Oh my God, the street outside our house is flooded.”

I wrote a flippant status message, unaware of how bad the situation was becoming around the city. “Time for tall tales and hyperbole: how high is the flood in your area?”

A day later, when the floodwater finally receded and the electricity came back, I wanted to write a reply to myself: “Five feet deep inside the house, and probably six or seven outside. What the hell were you doing, having a relaxed Saturday morning when you could have been moving the furniture earlier?”

In my defense, when I woke up that morning, there was no way of knowing I would later find myself staring at the ground floor from the second floor landing, watching the floodwater rise steadily and wondering if it would reach the second level and eventually, drive my family and me out of the house.

We had shut off our electric power to prevent further damage, so my sister and I checked the water level by the dim candlelight. “It’s not raining anymore, and the water stopped rushing in,” she called out. “But it’s halfway up the stairs.”

I peered down the stairwell. “Did I just see another turtle swim by? They really must be enjoying this.”

There was no way of knowing what was happening in the world outside, because as the years went by, we had swapped radios for iPods and our Internet was off. But even without looking beyond our street, we knew that we were already luckier than most, even if our house was half-submerged in murky brown water.

Most of our immediate neighbors were away and had left their helpers in charge –powerless and afraid, the hapless women had understandably jumped on the first rafts that came our way and left the houses unattended. From our window, we listened to our neighbors’ abandoned dogs yelp and watched muddied toys, pots and pans float away on the street.

We managed to save most of our stuff, but even then, we started late because up until the last minute, we thought the flood wouldn’t seep into our house – but it did, and fast. So for an hour or so, we scrambled around the house, stuffing knickknacks into garbage bags and pushing couches up the stairs (the piano proved to be the biggest challenge; I remember thinking at that moment that life would have been a lot easier had we taken up the flute instead).

But all the adrenaline in the world couldn’t give us the strength to carry larger items, such as our refrigerator, which we found floating around in our living room a couple of hours later. When the fridge bobbed along and turned over, I felt a pang to see half the magnets – mementos from the different cities I visited – were missing. A box of French macarons spilled out, leaving a trail of pastel-colored dots on the brown water.

Later that night, people started screaming. I knew they were miles away, because we could hear only a faint chorus of assorted shouts and whistles; it was like hearing a raucous game muffled by the walls of a gym. We rushed to a window, but all we could see were distant flashes of light. And just as soon as they came, the shouts subsided as the flashes of light disappeared.

“It was probably a rescue team,” someone piped up.

“How many people do you think they could rescue?” The room fell silent again.

The first rescue team came to our house another couple of hours later.

Dressed in scuba diving gear, they tugged a string of inflated tubes.

“Do you need to be rescued?” they called up at our window.

By then, the rains had subsided and we could actually see the roofs of the cars on the street – a good sign. We opted not to go with the rescue team, but the family next door went along with the next one that came by; one by one, they strapped on life jackets and loaded their sobbing children on the Jet Ski. Another paddled by on an inflated pool.

By midnight, the water had drained out of the house and we went down to inspect the damage. We flipped on the lights to find everything caked in mud. The wallpaper had been peeled off in some spots, and in others, air bubbles lifted off the fresh paint off the walls. The sinks were heaped with dry soil, the drawers filled with dirty water. We started bailing out mud from the floor, and someone put on a pot of instant noodles in preparation for the long night ahead.

The next couple of days were marked by an outpouring of support from friends and neighbors. People came in to move furniture, clean the floor and bring food and cleaning supplies. While I was grateful for all the concern and support my friends showed, I also felt guilty that they were helping us when others needed them more – like people who didn’t have homes, which had no food. People who lost their loved ones.

At first, I got just a little defensive when friends and acquaintances texted, asking me if I had been rescued, offering shelter for when we could evacuate out of the house. But I realized that it was just pride taking over, and that hey, we actually did need help – we were much luckier than others who had lost everything, but that didn’t mean we didn’t need anyone.

I was mortified when friends came over and saw me covered in mud trying to clean out the house, but when they didn’t say anything and merely picked up mops to help push out the sludge, it was a sign that our friendship went beyond Rock Band parties and trivia night marathons. My Twitter and Facebook news feeds have been cleared of trivialities for the meantime, as most people put aside their own concerns in order to look out for others.

It’s been a week since Ondoy stormed through the city, and our house is almost back to normal, albeit with a few scars, like the people who live in it. The scars are not physical; seared into the brain, they’re souvenirs of the day a river rushed through our house and brought out the strength we never knew we had – and the generosity of people surrounding us.