Aliaga, Philippines—Filipino farmer Ferdinand Pascua faces financial ruin after heavy rain brought by Typhoon ‘Pepito’ (Man-yi) sent torrents of water down a river near his shanty, bursting through an earthen dike and inundating land he has tilled for a decade.
‘Pepito’ was a super typhoon when it slammed into the Philippines over the weekend—the sixth major storm to hit the archipelago nation in the past month.
Pascua’s farm in Aliaga municipality, three hours drive north of Manila, was not in Pepito’s path, but the nearby Talavera river brought the storm right to his door on Sunday.
“We heard the water’s huge roar and the sound of collapsing earth,” Pascua, 38, told Agence France Presse (AFP) on Tuesday as he hauled wet clothes across knee-deep mud in his front yard.
“We were worried and in shock. I took my children to my parents’ home and returned to retrieve our stuff.”
The Talavera, swollen by heavy rain in the northern mountains of Luzon island where ‘Pepito’ crossed, took part of Pascua’s shanty and destroyed around 200 hectares (500 acres) of farmland that should have been protected by the dike.
While the typhoon is now far away, officials say the flooding will persist for the next three days as brown river water gushes through a 40-meter (130-foot) gap in the remains of the four-meter-tall dike and flows through dozens of houses in Santa Monica village.
“It (typhoon) did not hit us directly. The rain was not heavy. The problem is the rain that fell in Aurora flowed down here,” Yolando Santos, the elected village chief, told AFP, referring to the neighboring mountainous province to the east where ‘Pepito’ made its second landfall on Sunday.
Deeper into debt
While no one was killed or injured when the dike burst, villagers told AFP they worried that the farms will be permanently silted with sand and unfit for cultivation.
Many, like Pascua, had borrowed money from local loan sharks to finance the rice and corn crops that were wiped out, and they will now have to go deeper into debt.
Santos said about 200 hectares of farmland in the villages of Santa Monica and nearby Santa Lucia were flooded.
Corn crops on the other side of the river were also flattened as the waterway doubled in width to 80 metres.
On Tuesday, farmer Eduardo Santos, 53, stood on the edge of the damaged dike about 300 metres from his flooded house and watched the torrent of water go past.
Santos had borrowed 60,000 pesos ($1,020) at five percent interest a month to plant three hectares of rice and two hectares of corn.
He lost it all and now worries if three of his four children still in school will be forced to drop out.
“Getting back up is such a difficult thing. We do not know how to start all over again,” Santos said.
“We have no other option but to borrow money because we do not have funds to prepare the land for planting.”
Pascua said he was worried about how to find more work now that the farmland had been ruined.
For now, the family could rely on his 39-year-old wife, who works as a babysitter with a Manila family.
“Her pay is low but we are counting on it at this time until I can find a job,” Pascua said. “Water is a formidable adversary.”
