Typhoon Ondoy

The big news for me this weekend wasn’t Tiger Woods not winning The Tour Championship but still winning the FedExCup (though that was a great story; and lest we forget, Phil Mickelson had a great final round, winning the Tour Championship in style), or Lewis Hamilton winning his second F1 race of the season (and Jenson Button still edging teammate Rubens Barrichello for championship points). No, the big news for me was Typhoon Ondoy, internationally known as Tropical Storm Ketsana.

Ketsana started attacking the Philippines on Saturday morning, 26 September 2009, but people were as yet unaware of how bad it would get. Consequently, business went on pretty much as usual. It was only later that day that it became obvious that this storm was going to be more devastating than normal. Ketsana was historically the worst storm to hit Metro Manila in recorded history, and dumped more rain on the city than Hurricane Katrina did on New Orleans.

I only found out about it Saturday night, and I immediately turned to the net for news. Electricity was out in many parts of Manila, and the phone lines were mostly down. SMS’ took awhile to reach, but at least they made it through. Calls were difficult to place, but at least the Internet was up.

Clean-up’s gonna take awhile, that’s for sure.

Reminds me to be thankful that Malaysia is safe from most natural hazards. Sure, we still suffer from floods, and landslides, and even took a hit from the Asian Tsunami. But Malaysia doesn’t get anything on this scale.