Sunday, June 24, 2001
Escape from In a split second of fear, a Filipino father thrust his baby through the window of my car, dropped the crying bundle in my lap, then disappeared into the darkness as Mount Pinatubo spewed fire and ash into the sky. Later, I gave the baby to a woman who I hoped could find the father, but to this day I wonder if they were ever reunited.
Pinatubo
Ten years after Mount Pinatubo
rumbled to life and rained its
ghostly ash over the island of
Luzon in the Philippines, a
survivor recalls her desperate
race to safety and the father
who entrusted a stranger
with his child's life.By Susan Kreifels
Special to the Star-BulletinA decade has passed since one of the 20th century's most powerful volcanoes exploded in the Philippines. Mount Pinatubo forever marked the lives of 40,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, and forced two powerful U.S. military bases to close. Those who have experienced such a terrifying event can probably understand the desperation that made a father entrust his baby to a stranger in hopes of saving the child.
"A furious volcano. A trembling earth. A black hole. Gritty hell. The Philippine Armageddon," I reported on June 15, later known as "Black Saturday."
In 1991, I was covering the U.S. military forces in the Philippines. I lived within 10 miles of Mount Pinatubo, which was indistinguishable among the peaks seen through my bedroom window. But after 600 years of silence, smoke started drifting out its top in April. The seismic tremors grew, and on June 10, U.S. military officials at Clark Air Base, 8.6 miles from the volcano, evacuated 14,000 residents. They headed for an already packed Subic Bay Naval Station, doubling the population of that U.S. base 50 miles away. Only 1,500 essential personnel were left at Clark.
Families took only necessities, leaving behind photos, mementos, the most optimistic even their pets. But they never returned.
Within 48 hours, Pinatubo blew, belching out a monstrous mushroom of ash over Clark. Three days later, at 5:55 a.m., a major eruption spewed 2 cubic miles of ash, killed more than 500 people and buried 310 square miles of land. At the same time a typhoon hit, washing down a heavy blackness for the next 24 hours that was virtually impenetrable by light.My Filipino assistant Virgilio Herrera and I were in Angeles, a city of 300,000 people outside Clark, when day turned night and ash and small rocks started to pelt us. Although we couldn't see Pinatubo, we heard it booming and felt it shaking. Eerie orange flashes ignited the black skies. We didn't know what the volcano would do next. Our greatest fear was pyroclastic flows -- gas, molten rock and ash that could tumble down the mountainsides in excess of 100 mph, incinerating everything in its path.
Only the indigenous Aeta people had been evacuated by the Philippine government from their homes near the mountain. Now panicked villagers were fleeing the city with baskets on their heads, children in arms, and carabao running behind them. Roads were jammed. Our headlights showed the terror in their faces. Virgilio panicked because his wife and children were staying with his father-in-law, who refused to leave Angeles. The home was along a river bed -- the most likely place for a pyroclastic flow.
The home was caught between two collapsed bridges. Virgilio plowed through ash-covered rice paddies, his head out the window because the wipers jammed. We made it to the barrio and he disappeared down an empty street. Alone, I saw the silhouettes of two men who told me they didn't have a car. It was then that I panicked. If they stole ours, I told myself, we'd be left behind, buried in lava like the people of Pompeii. I screamed for Virgilio, who showed up seconds later. We crammed his three children, wife, elderly mother, a nephew and his eight-month pregnant sister into our small Mitsubishi, by then sputtering.
Along the way we squeezed in an elderly woman who was barely able to plod through the ash. It was then that the crying baby was passed through my jammed window, a man's voice pleading from the darkness to take his child to safety. He disappeared before I could say anything.I sat speechless. Virgilio's pregnant sister cried hysterically and threw up.
Although still fearful, I felt we had been chosen for a special mission -- to get that baby out safely. I will always marvel that Virgilio was able to do it. We dropped off the woman at an evacuation camp. On Virgilio's advice, I reluctantly gave her the baby. Strong bonds build quickly in times of fear and disaster. But we hoped the woman could trace the family. At least, I told myself, the child was out of immediate danger. And Filipinos are some of the most resourceful people on earth. Still, I felt guilty as we drove away. I didn't even know if I had held a boy or girl.
I filed my story in Manila and returned the next day. Light revealed a devastated countryside. "All the trees are bowed to the volcanic god," I wrote, "the weight of its wrath too much to stand. What has the Philippines done to deserve so much misery?"
The rich, green rice paddies had turned into gray-white desert, like the nuclear wastelands seen in bad movies. Lines of traumatized refugees trudged nowhere through hot, dusty ash, a half-foot thick or more. Were any of them the father and child?
Roofs had collapsed under the weight of ash, mudflows had taken down bridges, and cars had overturned in river beds. You couldn't tell road from ditch and the expressway was so rutted, I could barely keep my fingers on the lap computer.
We drove to a campsite to which Air Force troops had evacuated. That Sunday, June 16, was Father's Day. "It's difficult to describe the hellish nightmare that 40,000 troops, wives and children are now living," I wrote.
Communication between the two bases had mostly shut down. Subic was buried deeper than Clark and without power or water. Two girls died when the roof of the high school, their temporary shelter, collapsed. Men, many of them fathers, surrounded me for news and passed me names and phone numbers to tell families they were safe.They would not see their families for a long time. Subic Bay had become a nightmare of unflushed toilets and cold MREs, or meals-ready-to-eat that are combat rations. The Navy sent the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to evacuate 20,000 people. Allowed one suitcase each, they stood in long lines in the rain. Kids with eyes as round as portholes walked the long gangplank. A sailor tossed a whimpering 150-pound German shepherd over his shoulder and boarded what had become "USS Noah's Ark." As taps blew, howls rang the decks. But those pets were luckier than the ones left behind at Clark.
We were all thankful to have survived. Still, "the blast truly hit home," I wrote. "I would probably never again see the photos documenting my work and life for the last 10 years. All I have is a small pile of wet, ash-caked clothes, and I think of all the military families that probably feel the same devastating loss."
A week later, I saw how close death came. The Sacobia River bordered Clark's Mactan housing area. Not far from "where Clark children played three days before Mount Pinatubo erupted, the ground is steaming like a scene from the Creation," I wrote. "It is the most awesome and terrifying thing I have ever seen. I start to understand the fury that was unleashed nine miles from my bedroom."An 8-foot-deep flow of molten rock and gas had rushed down the river at 135 mph, burning at 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit. Landslides still crashed down and plumes of steam shot up 300 feet. The mountain, a volcanologist told me, had "cracked like French bread."
Mudflows inside the base dragged vehicles 150 feet. "If we hadn't pulled out, it would have been catastrophic," said Clark spokesman Lt. Col. Ron Rand as we stood together, awestruck.
Within the year the Air Force left Clark, much of it stripped by looters. Subic was resurrected but the Philippine Senate voted to oust the Navy the next year.
Unlike the Americans, most Filipinos could not move. The Philippine government was ill-prepared to deal with 200,000 refugees. For weeks, black walls of ash from continuing eruptions descended on the area, and people traveled with their noses covered. Lahars -- ash floods washed down the mountainsides during rainy season -- buried provinces, with church steeples often the only clue of a village.
Today, the area largely remains a gray-white desert. Even though special economic zones have replaced the U.S. bases, and entrepreneurs have cashed in on Pinatubo tours, many still suffer. The Central Luzon Center for Emergency Aid and Rehabilitation Inc. reported recently that Pinatubo claimed 2,729 lives and 500 villages, and that floods continue to disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands each year.
On Father's Day, I pulled photos from the Internet to see what Pinatubo looks like now, and still got chills. I called my dad, feeling very fortunate.
And I prayed that a little kid in Angeles, probably close to 11 now, was spending the day with his or her dad.