Link to Part 1 is here, and here’s the latest Typhoon Noru update from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA):
- Winds are down to 140 km/h, making Noru a strong Category 1 storm, but gusts are still dangerously high at 230 km/h.
- The storm is still moving westward at 20km/h, and it is now in the mountains west of Tarlac City.
- This is unofficial, but a Filipino friend with business connections back in Manila tells me that the Marikina River in Metro Manila is flooding. This meshes with heavy rainfall warnings across both the metr
Now that Typhoon Noru is moving away from Mrs. Fleek Dogg’s family farm in Cabanatuan City, Nueva Ecija, I am starting a new diary to dig into the aftermath of this storm based on what I’ve been seeing on Twitter. I’ll start with a juicy one as I ask “could tweets like these blow up and become President Bong Bong’s Katrina moment?”
The president of the Philippines real name is Ferdinand Marcos Jr, but let’s fleekin’ humor him and call him “Bong Bong” because that’s what he likes to call himself. Names are powerful, and “bong” squared is the perfect mind trick for disassociating himself with his father’s abusive dictatorship.
The parallels between Bong Bong’s and Bush Jr are eerily fascinating. Both Bush Jr. and Bong Bong are sons of former presidents, and both had to deal with major hurricanes/typhoons within a year of winning a majority at the polls. Bush Jr’s handling of Katrina in 2005 exposed a lot of rot behind the façade that convinced a majority to vote him into power.
Before you think any more deeply about what this implies for Bong Bong, I must share a caveat. That is, communications technology was not the same back when Katrina exposed our own Junior president. Many Filipinos get their news from toxic feeds on Facebook and TikTok. The façade that Marcos Jr. put up to get his majority was tailor-made for information silos spewing disinfo. Made-for-social-media propaganda is what Bong Bong used to whitewash his family history and convince 31 million Filipinos to bring back the Marcos “golden age.”
After explicitly telling the world not to judge him by his father, Bong Bong seemed to have been lying low and avoid drama to the point that I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Super Typhoon Noru is now bringing out the contrast of his vanity, which seems to run in the Marcos family, and his political rival who took 2nd place in the May presidential election:
Leni Robredo’s tweet, by the way, translates to “we will help wherever needed.”
I haven’t seen any positive tweeting about his handling of a Category 3 Hurricane hitting the most densely populated region of his country, and it It looks like he is not even in his country. Now I understand that heads of state travel overseas all the time, but when I checked Bong Bong’s twitter feed it shows that he is just making announcements related to the storm without offering any uplifting or sympathetic words to the millions that he tricked into voting for him. Other than that, his most recent tweets focus on him tooting his horn about what he got done in New York City. He did tweet about his meeting with President Biden on Friday, so hopefully Bong Bong at least convinced Joe that he won’t be like his mom and dad and pocket any disaster aid money that the USA may send.
So I’ve shared the Bong Bong tweets for now, and I’ll be updating this diary with some environmental themed tweets, share some background about why this storm was so personally triggering for me, and continue to track Typhoon Noru’s path to Vietnam.
Sunday, Sep 25, 2022 · 11:42:21 PM +00:00 · FleekDoggPPLH
The sun has risen in the Philippines, and reports came in from both family homes in Nueva Ecija around an hour ago. There is still no electricity, but mobile data is working. My stepdaughter and her family in the southern part of the province, which got the worst of the eyewall, reports no damage to her home.
The family and farm dogs in Cabanatuan City are also OK, with no damage to any structures. There is just a lot of sticks and leaves to clean up around the house, and my stepson lost enough unripe guava fruits from the branches on the farm to be upset when chatting with his mother.
It is not yet clear how the rice crop and the lime orchard fared, but the guavas are a cash crop that gets harvested every other day. Without the guavas, the family is dependent on savings from twice-a-year rice and lime harvests and remittances from overseas relatives.
Now I had been expecting that Mrs. Fleek Dogg and I would have to pitch in through the holidays because climate change has made the guavas unreliable. Thanks to heavier storms interspaced by drought, the economical crops have been few and far between since at least our wedding at the end of 2015. That was when Typhoon Lando wiped out a guava crop just weeks before my wife and I left our jobs in Taiwan and came to the Philippines. We quickly ran through our savings, which meant that I had to return to the states and take a stop gap box truck delivery job out of a very Trumpy warehouse in 2016.
That is why typhoons coming are always triggering for me, sparking me to worry about loss as I had to make a huge sacrifice after my first bad Filipino storm. At this point we can handle the financial hits as long as the family, farmhouses, and farm animals all make it through. I actually realized that we have already invested to adapt living spaces for climate change by reinforcing concrete and replacing two tall yard trees with shorter but more fruit-bearing trees.
Other families are not so fortunate, so I’ll leave a donation link to help the farmers of Central Luzon who really need it (which does not include our farm — Mrs. Fleek Dogg and I can cover things there):
The agricultural economy in the Philippines will just have to adapt to more and more strong storms and prolonged droughts. I haven’t seen much news on how widespread crop damage is, but I would reckon that there are at least several hundred thousand small farmers in Central Luzon who are not fortunate enough to fall back on remittances.
I’ll close with sharing an estimate of crops at risk from the same non-profit behind the donations link:
Monday, Sep 26, 2022 · 12:51:36 AM +00:00
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FleekDoggPPLH
Here’s my final update on the storm track — Typhoon Noru is still a Cat 1, blowing at 140 km/h nearly 200 km off the west coast of Pangasinan Province.
The storm is tracking WNW at a faster clip (30 km/h) now, and it’s looking to be due south of Hainan, China by Tuesday afternoon local time. That is when Noru will become a threat to Vietnam — still too far out to tell exactly where but probably along the central coast near Da Nang on Wednesday. Noru will decay into a tropical storm over Laos and a tropical depression over northern Thailand, where I presume it will be a flooding and landslide hazard in the hills of both countries.
I’ll end this diary’s final update with some more tweets to follow up on news and speculation from earlier today. I’ll start with some sad but obvious news about the rice crop getting knocked out in Central Luzon, which is known as the “Rice Bowl of the Philippines.”
Expect this to add a little more gasoline to the food price inflation fire, which is bad enough given other climate disasters and the Ukraine War.
Flooding can be partially prevented in the future by protecting the remaining rainforests in the Sierra Madre Mountain Range that runs along the Northeast Coast of Luzon.
Eventually the hilly terrain that has been cleared for pasture and marginal agriculture will need to be reforested enough to allow watersheds to absorb and slow down runoff from ever heavier typhoon rains. There is already some promising reforestation going on along a foothill ridgeline in Palayan City, within 5 kilometers of the under construction home where I plan to retire with Mrs. Dogg (still no updates but presumably fine as it was built as strong as our family home 10 kilometers down the road).
I’m starting to think that this will paradoxically take continued urbanization balanced with smart growth, with population densifying around higher ground near existing and under-construction highways and railways. I’m also seriously starting to think that agriculture in tropical storm-prone areas like the northern Philippines will have to increasingly happen indoors where crops can be protected from heat, winds, and floods.
That is all the topic of a separate diary however, so I’ll leave you with one last juicy tweet that goes into the politics of climate change and Bong Bong:
We’ll have to see what Marcos Jr. does about recovery from Noru, which got freakishly strong at the last minute, in the short term. Not to mention what he does about Climate Change in the long run, but for now I’ll say I fleekin’ dare him to build those expressways along the Sierra Madre coast without creating an adjacent national park, kicking out all the squatters and illegal loggers, and ensuring that all cars on those new roads are electric ASAP.