Typhoon's Tail

One day last week aboard the Empress of Japan, placidly ploughing across the China Sea to Hongkong, Commonwealth-President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines began to receive a steady stream of wireless reports. Before the day was out he had proclaimed a "state of calamity," had issued a decree appropriating $500,000 from the Commonwealth's scanty treasury for emergency relief. A South Pacific typhoon had just caused one of the worst catastrophes in Philippine history.

Connoisseurs of typhoons, the Filipinos thought little of it when one of these lethal storms whipped straight across the lower portion of Luzon fortnight ago. Only ten or 15 people were killed and a few hundred houses razed. But like a man who rejoices at escaping the jaws of a crocodile only to be crushed by its flailing tail, Filipinos began to think differently when the backlash of the typhoon curled back and caught northern Luzon. The fury of the storm had abated but the heavens over the three northwestern provinces of the island suddenly liquefied. Through those provinces--Nueva Vizcaya, Isabela, Cagayan--flows the Rio Grande de Cagayan, biggest river of the Philippines, due north through 200 miles of rich farming country. The typhoon passed, the rain stopped and then came calamity. The Cagayan began to rise.

A constabulary officer, Lieutenant Pedro Dionisio, raced the flood to his headquarters at Echaguee and telegraphed before the wires went down that there were already 20 known dead in the village of Cagayan. He added: "No reports received from the towns and barrios around Ilagan, as they are submerged." The postmaster at Alcala succeeded in reporting that the river was six feet over the tops of the telegraph poles. Reports from another village indicated that there were 75 persons missing; 54 villages were known to be submerged; people crouching on the roofs of their houses were carried away screaming in the flood. After aerial surveys the Red Cross reported some 1,500 square miles inundated in Nueva Vizcaya, 2,000 square miles in Isabela; homeless, 80,000, missing, 1,000, known dead, 118.

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