Ephraim Alfaro, Freshman
This year's most powerful typhoon hit the Philippines this month, and the aftermath is unbelievable. On November 1st, it hit land and caused a huge amount of damage. It was classified as a super typhoon as it had wind speeds of 195 miles per hour, equivalent to a stage 4 hurricane. There are almost 107 million people in the Philippines and 24,000,000 of them are in severely affected areas.
To put the damage in perspective, there is $141,000,000 in damages, with $23,000,000 to crops and farmland. Twenty thousand farmers were affected and this could lead to lasting effects, as more food will have to be imported, as the farms will not be able to do as well as they would have before. The typhoon was so powerful that 65% of the homes in the affected area were damaged and there is still no electricity. The electricity problem is a compound effect too; not only are the power lines down, but six power plants have been stopped. This has caused 125 cities to have no electricity, causing big issues as without electricity it is an extremely rough environment and it makes evacuation attempts far harder.
The reason why the Philippines gets so many typhoons and so many powerful ones is because the islands are right next to the typhoon belt. This is an area in the Pacific Ocean region that has intense winds and drastic temperature changes that can lead to conflicting air flow. This means that the hot air will go against the cold air and this has a high tendency to make the rotary motion required to start a typhoon. Because of these properties, the chances of a more destructive typhoon is much higher.
One of the reasons why this typhoon was such a big problem was due to the coronavirus and the regulations around it. Due to the regulations, safety workers have to follow guidelines in order to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, especially because there are a lot of Covid positive people in the area hit by the typhoon. The regulations also meant that it was harder to get the necessary things in place for the relief effort and evacuation. However, this was only for the people who did not try to evacuate, as the evacuation centers were filled to the brim with people and there was not enough preparation as a result of the pandemic. Even worse, there were many Covid positive patients coming out of hospitals who also had to go to the evacuation centers and this meant that there was a far higher likelihood of getting the disease. Then, a lot of the people, who did not evacuate, went into shelters that were also cramped, so the disease spread there as well. This created this horrible compound effect where the coronavirus regulations stopped preparations from being good enough, which also caused the virus to spread more because of the lack of preparation.
Works Cited:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/typhoon-goni-philippines-rolly-damage/2020/11/02/6bab44ba-1cc7-11eb-ad53-4c1fda49907d_story.html
https://reliefweb.int/report/philippines/philippines-super-typhoon-goni-rolly-humanitarian-needs-and-priorities-nov-2020
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2020/11/02/589132.htm
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2020/11/05/589691.htm#:~:text=Super%20Typhoon%20Goni%2C%20the%20world's,'%20disaster%20risk-monitoring%2
https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/11/1076742
https://www.adrc.asia/nationinformation.php?NationCode=608&Lang=en#:~:text=Located%20along%20the%20typhoon%20belt,frequent%20earthquakes%20and%20volcanic%20eruptions.
Comments