Quotes of the Day

The Philippines is accustomed to destruction caused by the dozen or more monsoons that take swipes at the archipelago each summer and autumn. The country is also good at rapid recoveries: in the countryside, families begin repairing their thatched and bamboo homes even before the ground has dried. Within days, trees snapped in half start showing fresh, green growth.

Eastern Luzon is unlikely to recover so swiftly from the typhoon havoc of last week, because the disaster was only part natural—and largely the work of man. Two storms slammed in from the Philippine Sea, hitting the coastal areas of Quezon province north of Manila. Normally, the interior Sierra Madre mountains would block and tame the storms, and the rain would be absorbed by the roots of the trees that line the mountainsides. But the mountains in Quezon have been steadily denuded of trees in the past four decades. (Much of the logging is illegal.) The mountains behind the towns of Real, Infanta and General Nakar no longer function as shield or sponge. Instead, they have become instruments of death—powerful delivery systems of floodwater and mud. Last Monday, Mary Anne Bantucan, a 34-year-old schoolteacher from Maragondon, was returning to her hometown from Infanta in a jeepney with her mother and eight other passengers when Typhoon Winnie hit the coast. "I saw this house being swept away in its entirety," she recalls, "and the cars, vans and jeeps behind us were all washed away." Then came a landslide of mud clotted with felled trees that had yet to be hauled to the sawmill. "The road was blocked by logs and debris and there was nonstop rain." The passengers slept in the jeepney that night, and at dawn Bantucan and her mother walked the remaining distance to their town. By the time the storms had moved away from the Quezon coast late last week, at least 640 people were confirmed dead and nearly 400 were missing.

Rescue efforts were made almost impossible by blocked roads, washed-out bridges and the storms that succeeded Winnie. (President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo tried visiting Real by helicopter on Wednesday but had to cancel her trip because of the bad weather.) In Real, a three-story building at a beach hotel complex that was being used as an evacuation center collapsed, killing 114 and leaving 150 missing. Soldiers slogged through mud to deliver body bags and lime to cover decomposing corpses awaiting burial. In the province of Rizal, the Quizan family's house was flooded with water, but Roberto Quizan and his three sons and daughter managed to clamber onto the corrugated-tin roof. While waiting to be rescued, the youngest son, 12-year-old Roberto, got entangled in a live power line. His father tried to save him, and then the two other boys rushed to help. All four were electrocuted. "I've lost all the males in my family," sobbed daughter Lea, 19, who now lives in a temporary shelter in the town of Rodriguez. Arroyo called for a crackdown on the highly lucrative lumber trade that has stripped the mountains. Millions of hectares of forest have disappeared in recent decades—and the Philippines is reminded every year how hazardous it is to fool around with Mother Nature.

• Anthony Spaeth
• Illegal logging has allowed normal typhoons to become killers