A hundred years ago today

A. Paulita Roa

ON Jan. 21, 1916, heavy rains and strong winds struck Cagayan unexpectedly. It was categorically a super typhoon though unnamed since it was not the custom of that time to name storms after people. For three consecutive days, the heavens poured so much rain that Cagayan River overflowed it banks. the waters entered Macasandig, an old barrio along the river. From there, the floodwaters reached the Cogon area where the present public market is located.

At the poblacion or the town proper, Plaza Divisoria and Calle Nueva (Pabayo St.) were covered with murky waters that residents went around the area riding in rafts or bancas. My aunt and my father both told me that the waters reached up to the second floor of their residence. Farm crops were destroyed, houses were swept away and many trees were uprooted. There is an extant photo at the  Cagayan de Oro City Museum taken by Don Antonio Cosin titled “What the storm has wrought. Jan. 21-24, 1916” showing two houses that collided due to the storm.

When the storm left, it was not yet the end of the sufferings of the Kagay-anons. As the floodwaters subsided, there was a severe lack of potable drinking water for all wells were polluted. Sanitation became a big problem. Then cholera struck and quickly spread around the town that it became an epidemic. Many people died daily. The death toll from this epidemic was higher than the number of people that died from the flood.

The municipal government decided to bury people in mass graves up in the barrio of Indahag. One burial site there was in Calavera Cave. According to an old relative, an uncle accompanied a carromata that carried the body of his dead wife together with other cholera victims to Indahag for mass burial. The following day, he too, died and was buried immediately.

The flood and the cholera epidemic brought untold devastation and deep mourning to the people in Cagayan for almost every household in town had a family member that died. What compounded the pain and loss was the fact that at that time, disaster relief operations were unheard of and minimal help was extended to the families.

I know of the story of four young children who were orphaned when their parents died from cholera a day from each other. The youngest was just a newborn babe and later in life, she never tire of recounting what her adoptive aunt told her that in the presence of the bodies of her parents, close relatives came and chose whom they wanted to adopt.

It was during this time when the twin tragedies happened that  Dr. Frank Laubach, a young American missionary together with his wife, Effa, a nurse, worked tirelessly among the townspeople and helped whatever they could to alleviate their sufferings. Later,  Laubach, known to be a very prayerful man, got down on his knees and dedicated Cagayan to the Lord.

Those who survived the 1916 super typhoon and cholera epidemic said the lumads believed that after 50 years, another great storm will come to Cagayan. However, it was 95 years later that super typhoon Sendong struck Cagayan with such force that it claimed more that two thousand lives in the early dawn of Dec. 17, 2011.