Junk Pax Silica

 

“WHEN PEOPLE hear the words AI supply chain, they think of computer chips. But the chips are only the tip of a very long tail. The chain runs on thousands of inputs. It runs on the precision motors, rare-earth magnets, packaging and testing that turns a slice of silicon into something a buyer can plug in, moldings, plastics, and so much more…

For each of those parts, our position today is unacceptably overconcentrated… When 90% of a critical input comes from one country, you do not have a supply chain. You have a hostage chain…

The State Department would treat economic security as a product to be built, not a policy to be announced. Today, on this piece of ground, we are here to see the first such product come into being — a partnership of a kind that has not been tried before, between the United States and its oldest ally in Asia, the Philippines.

This is the site of a planned Economic Security Zone to fuse together the predictability and certainty of American law to the speed and scale of Asia.

Predictability, speed, and scale, in one place.” 

Thus, spoke US Undersecretary of State Jacob Helberg on his visit to the planned Pax Silica site at New Clark City on May 18, 2026. His very rationale for the project already brimming with all the horrors – geopolitical, economic, environmental – attendant to it.

Horrors, that the Philippine government has, at the onset, masked with platitudes to development, notably the Bases Conversion and Development Authority ordaining the 4,000 acres allotted to the project “to serve as a Pax Silica Coordination Office where technology firms, research institutions, and government agencies can converge to build a robust AI ecosystem, accelerate innovation, attract high-value investments.” 

Indeed, calling it as the “Golden Node – a new model for AI-native investment acceleration hubs, translating into more quality job opportunities for Filipinos and greater participation of local enterprises in the growing innovation-driven economy across the globe.”

“Hundreds of thousands of jobs” becoming Finance Secretary Frederick Go’s recurring refrain at every mention of Pax Silica. The hype with which government tried to impact Pax Silica into the nation’s consciousness indeed worked – to the applause of the gullible, but adversely so to the astute. Though it really does not need a genius to see the farce behind Pax Silica.

 

US imperialism redux

“This is fundamentally about war production, not neutral industrial development. Pax Silica is the production aspect, while the US-Philippines critical minerals framework is the foundation. Together, these lock in a pipeline from extraction and processing of strategic minerals to semiconductor and electronics output, aimed at reducing US dependence on China-linked materials and supply routes.”

So declared members of the Makabayan Bloc as early as April 19, warning that it “will further subordinate the Philippines to US strategic priorities and expose our people, economy, and environment to heightened risks.”

Rather than its promised development for the nation, Pax Silica will push the country into low-tier roles in the value chain, especially assembly, testing, packaging, and other labor-intensive, lower-value segments while the foreign locators take all the real money and technology back to their home countries, the group warned.

Environmental impact

It is a research-given that data centers place major stress on public water systems, especially during hotter days when cooling demand rises. Estimates raised in public discussions put at the range of 5 million to 20 million gallons of water per day the requirements of AI data centers in the proposed Pax Silica hub, “depending on the scale, cooling system, and final design of the facilities.”

That’s just much too much an impact not only on the commercial, industrial, residential, and recreational areas of New Clark City, Clark Freeport and Special Ecozone, including the Clark International Airport but also on the contiguous communities of Pampanga and Tarlac, the site being a watershed area. 

This impending crisis to be compounded by energy capacity, or its insufficiency: The Luzon grid frequently experiences thin operating reserves, triggering red and yellow alerts during the dry summer months. With Pax Silica shall come massive power shortages and spiraling electricity bills. 

Surrendering our patrimony

“It just completely compromises our sovereignty for someone else's gain,” noted creative director Gerry Cacanindin in his FB page. “The people pushing for it say we need this to finally become a high-tech nation instead of just relying on call centers and OFW remittances. But the way it's set up right now, it just feels like we're inviting someone into our house to use up our electricity, drink all our water, mess up the living room, and leave us with a tiny tip.”

Youth call

“Anuman ang ipinapangakong kaunlaran, pamumuhunan, o paglikha ng kabuhayan ay hindi kailanman magiging sapat na katuwiran kung ang kapalit nito ay ang pagkasira ng likas na yaman, paglabag sa karapatan ng mga komunidad, at paglalagay sa kapakanan ng mamamayan sa panganib. Ang tunay na pag-unlad ay dapat nakabatay sa katarungang panlipunan, pangangalaga sa kalikasan, at paggalang sa dignidad at karapatan ng bawat Pilipino.”

The Bulacan State University-College of Science and Social Philosophy – Local Student Council said in its call for the government to junk Pax Silica, pressing: “Hindi kailanman maaaring tawaging pag-unlad ang isang proyektong yumayaman sa kapinsalaan ng mamamayan at ng kalikasan. Ang pag-unlad na may kapalit na pagkawasak ay hindi pag-unlad—ito ay pagsasamantala.”

A call lost in the wilderness, there. Tethered to Uncle Sam, government makes the proverbial monkey trio of no-hear, no-see, no-speak. With media reports. Photos: FB screengrabs, credits to owners.  

 

Lubyak na pabilog

 

Ani environmental management system ng lungsod: “Nagpatuloy ang waterways task force sa pagsasagawa ng regular na clearing operations ngayong araw ...”

…sa araw-araw, lahat ng araw

paikot-ikot

pabalik-balik

walang hanggang paglilinis

walang katapusang pagbasura sa paligid.   

pati paskel na bawal

ginawang tambakan

multa, walang bisa

parusa, kailan pa?

isip-isip –

kung walang itinatapon

ano ang liligpitin?

entonces –

aanhin pa ang basurero

para que pa ang kaminero?

kalat-kalat

linis-linis

ekonomiya ng basura

paikot-ikot,

pumapaimbulog.  

 

 

 

Pinatubo at 35/Part 5: The Triumph of Thievery

ALONG WITH Independence Day, the Mount Pinatubo eruptions take centerstage every second week of June in Pampanga. With the celebration of the resilience, iron will, and triumph of the Capampangan spirit as recurring, indeed, unvarying, theme. 

This, if only to for the younger generations to learn, if only in passing, the hardships their elders hurdled, the sacrifices made for this life they live today. 

That triumph literally memorialized in at least two books I had the privilege of crafting – Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit commissioned by the San Fernando Heritage Foundation in 2008, and Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph commissioned by the Agyu Tamu Movement of the friends of Mayor Ed Pamintuan in 2011.

We are not short in remembering either the agony of the Pinatubo devastations or the ecstasy of the Capampangan rising, aye, soaring, from it.

In our remembrance though, we have glossed over the evil – yes, that evil that was worse, much more hellish than the ashfalls and lahar flows – that struck the Capampangan in the wake of the volcanic havoc. It was as though Satan himself came with Pinatubo’s vomit. 

There was the plunder of the American-abandoned Clark Air Base.

Under the patronage of someone most appropriately named “Hakot” – the way we Capampangans pronounce it with our penchant for adding the letter H where it should not be – the once bastion of American imperialism and decadent capitalism in the Asia-Pacific was cleared not so much of volcanic debris as of anything of value that remained in it. Yeah, not even door knobs, toilet bowls and sinks were spared.

An even more profitable enterprise that arose from the devastated base: the total demolition of damaged buildings, the scrap – galvanized iron roofing, wood paneling and ceilings, parquet and tile flooring, steel beams – contracted out to junk dealers. Egress of the contraband from Clark’s guarded gates facilitated by the guards themselves.  
A living monument of that thieving to this day – the CAB Hospital a ruined shell of its former self as the best military medical facility in the whole of the Far East.

So, it was futile to fight nature’s course. Still, to save the “saveable” was proffered the nobler cause. Hence, the engineering interventions that were the sabo dams and the earthen dikes. 

Nothing more than Sisyphean – those dams and dikes in an endless cycle of building, being washed out at every heavy rainfall, rebuilding, washed out again… — the interventions were nonetheless pursued most zealously for reasons that turned out to be least humanitarian but most cornucopian – their being inexhaustible source of cash, mountains of cash – for certain public works officials and their private contractor cohorts, best known for the moniker “Pajero Gang” after their preferred mode of transport.  

Even more lucrative were the desilting operations whereby contractors could just say what they had dredged and dug out of the river channels was washed back by the rains to the same rivers. 

Indeed, some guys have all the smarts: finding the greatest opportunity in the worst adversity. Tumubo, tumabo sa hagkis ng Bulkang Pinatubo, as some wag came to calling these contactors then.

Come to think of it now, Angeles City – its Balibago entertainment district specifically – could have owed its rising to this cabal of government engineers and private contractors as it was in the remaining night joints there that the transactions of por diez, por diez porciento were dealt, sealed, and delivered. Under the cover of darkness – oh, so appropriate.

As with the dams and dikes, so with the relocation and housing sites.

The fair market value of the chosen sites suddenly becoming fairest, not so much to the landowner’s but to the government purchaser’s delight.  

The initial houses and lots instantly damned as fit for swine not for humans. Pigpens at the cost of homes, right there.

Then, what about the donations of tens if not hundreds of millions directly going to the bank accounts of certain local officials, and/or laundered in some feeding program, stress debriefing, or-relief giving?   

Aye, as much as the triumph was the thievery that obtained with the Mount Pinatubo eruptions and its devastating aftermath.

So, we – the survivors – rightfully celebrate and congratulate ourselves for our resiliency, our excellence in raising Pampanga to an even higher level of development, wanting to impact the lessons of Pinatubo to the current and coming generations of our race.

So, those who made money out of our misery have their own kind of celebration. No one went to court, much less to jail. Their crime did, indeed, pay. The greater lesson of Pinatubo is right there. Unlost to succeeding generations of unmodified greed and unbridled corruption that birthed the “politicontractors,” evolving into the “congtractors” of the flood control project scams.    

(Updated from original published on June 17, 2019)

 

 

Pinatubo at 35/Part 4: The forgotten hero

 

BY CALAMITY defined.

No, not for having caused the calamity but for facing it, taking its full brunt, and rising above it. Thus, Mayor Roy David of Porac, Pampanga found his defining moment in the Mount Pinatubo devastations consequent to the eruptions.

Buried in the volcano’s vomit, besieged by the onslaught of lahar rampages, Porac turned into a ghost town, ready to be abandoned by the national government as catch basin for all pyroclastic flows from Pinatubo. A sacrifice worthy of a holocaust to appease nature’s deity, in this case the Aetas’ Apo Namalyari, for the salvation of the rest of Pampanga.

But no, David would have none of all the talks to “let nature take its course,” and with it, give up all hopes for Porac.

The town cut off from its then-principal economic lifeline that was Angeles City by the chasm that the Pasig-Potrero River had become, David made the impossible passable in a variety of ingenuous means as the truck-mounted metal contraption euphemized as the “London Bridge” (as in the song, “falling down, falling down” sans a fair lady in sight though); the lined-up, sandbag-filled container vans serving as bridges; the sugarcane trucks providing piggy-back rides to smaller vehicles; as well as the immediate scraping and dredging of the riverbed after each lahar passing. Earning for the mayor the uncontested moniker “Lahar Fighter.” 

Beyond the devastation of his town, David saw the impending swamping of the municipalities downstream from what he then called “the vantage point of geography and mandated by the law of gravity” – the elevation of Porac higher than that of San Fernando, Bacolor, Guagua, down to the even lower lying towns of Sto. Tomas, Masantol, Macabebe, and Sasmuan.

Guiao

Sharing his insights during a meeting of mayors and Gov. Bren Z. Guiao, David was readily ridiculed as the boy who cried wolf for his insistence that lahar, which within the first months of the eruptions have already devastated his whole town, would ultimately inundate the capital town and all areas downstream Pasig-Potrero.

“E mu ke piyabe-yabe keng problema mu," was how the mayors dismissed David’s alarums.

It was about this time too that Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology director Raymundo Punongbayan broached the foreboding scenario of a Pampanga buried in lahar, duly reported by Ding Cervantes in the Philippine Star.

Only to be abruptly denied by Punongbayan after some closed-door encounter with Guiao and the local businessmen, thereafter issuing certification of the capital as “safe from lahar.” This, so as not to panic incoming investors and those transferring from Angeles City which bore the brunt of the initial eruptions.  

Left veritably alone to fend for his townspeople, David thereafter found an ally in his townmate then-Vice Gov. Manuel “Lito” Lapid who shared the same sentiment of saving Porac from physical obliteration at all cost. This turned into the cause that sparked Lapid’s gubernatorial run that subsequently buried Guiao in an avalanche never before seen in Pampanga politics. But that is another, if closely related, story.

Diking, dying

“To dike is to die.” Came the cry that reverberated across the province, reaching Imperial Manila, in spirited opposition of the townsfolk against the enclosure of Porac within a diking system that would have buried the whole town.

And with the highly popular Lapid at the Capitol, the wholesale consignment of his town to oblivion was stayed.

This, even as David’s warnings proved prescient with the first lahar flows reaching villages in Bacolor, right at the fringes of the capital town.  

It was the turn of the mayors and the businessmen to raise the alarm – crying “Time to Panic” they mobilized rallies and marches in San Fernando, one virtually on the eve of the Cabalantian tragedy of October 1, 1995 that turned panic into raw terror. 

“To dike or to die.” So morphed the cry of Porac with its arrogation by the Save San Fernando Movement to themselves, joined in by the other towns’ copycatting “save movements” as well as the province’s own. 

This time, the object of their supplication being a megadike system that shall effectively contain and control lahar movement in the Pasig-Potrero River.

Credits

To give full credit to the save movements, notably San Fernando’s, for the erection of the FVR megadike – as what contemporary narratives have come to tell, the accolades getting grander at every retelling – is not only to revise history but to halve the truth. It is to deny the contribution of the hundreds of other individuals and groups that worked as hard and long, if not even harder and longer, for the megadike to come to concretion, literally and metaphorically. 

There were the people of Bacolor led by Mayor Ananias Canlas Jr. and parish priest Rev. Fr. Sol Gabriel who made the most sacrifice with the greater part of the megadike occupying their town.   

There was the Mount Pinatubo Commission led by its executive director Tony Fernando. The public works people from Secretary Greg Vigilar to his Pinatubo point man Florante Soriquez and his engineers Sev Enriquez and Lita Manalo – whatever unsavory things may have been written about them – and yes, Rafael “Pye” Yabut.

There were the “good” contractors and constructors that did not come short of, but even exceeded, the specifications of construction. Yes, Marni Castro – dubbed “Mr. Megadike,” distinct and separate from the movement he was member of – for doggedly making sure the constructors did as programmed. 

There was Sen. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Cong. Oscar Rodriguez who took the cudgels for Pampanga in both Houses. San Fernando Mayor Rey Aquino, Angeles Mayor Ed Pamintuan and Cong. Tarzan Lazatin too. Lest we forget, Cong. Zeny Ducut, Pampanga Mayors League president Lubao Mayor Lilia "Baby" Pineda, Vice Gov. Cielo Macapagal-Salgado. 

There was by then former Governor Guiao, in situ in Malacanang as chair of some movement called Kabisig, within earshot of the President.  

There was Lapid with his famous impassioned “sardinas” plea to President Ramos – a euphemism for the P555 million to start the construction of the megadike. (555 Sardines, anyone?). And then there was – backstopping and brain trusting Lapid in anything and everything that had to do with Pinatubo at that time – none other than Mayor Roy David.

And most assuredly, there were even more.

“To dike or to die.” So was the collective cry.

The dike was built. The Kapampangan did not die.

Comes then the bitterest sadness at every commemoration of this much-hyped “triumph of the Kapampangan spirit” when the usual limelight-hoggers are celebrated the most while the many who worked harder, sacrificed more, are barely recognized, if even remembered.  

Yes, I write as much as I witness to all these. Privileged as I am for having covered it all, first as a journalist, then as senior consultant to Governor Lapid in his first term, and back as journalist.  

(First published June 15, 2020. All photos from the book Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit (2008), edited by Bong Z. Lacson) 

 

Pinatubo at 35/Part 3: Agyu Tamu!

 

FROM OUT of the depths of desolation and despair, a cry – faint at first, then resonant all across the city.

There rekindled some flicker of hope that the city can rise again, if only the people believed in themselves – that, yes: “We Can.”

Summoning storied People Power, acting Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan led thousands of his constituents to the Abacan River to confront the gravest threat to their very existence: Lahar. 

“Pala Ko, Buhay Mo,” the activity was named.

With picks and shovels, hoes and rakes – many with no implement other than their bare hands, the determined populace sandbagged the riverbanks – bamboo stakes serving as improvised sheet piles – in a bid to check further scouring by lahar. It was futile as pathetic an effort, with but ten minutes of lahar flow, not the slightest trace of the day’s work remained. 

The determination of the community though gained international respect and recognition, their activity winning for the coordinating agency, the Angeles City “Kuliat” Jaycees, the Best Community Involvement Project in the 47^th World Jaycees Congress in Miami, Florida.

The can-do spirit at the Abacan River thence inspiring and spawning clean-up projects all around the city. Manufacturers joined their craftsmen and artisans in rebuilding their factories to revive productivity. Among the first was Cruz Wood Industries which resumed its manufacture and export of high-end furniture within 45 days after the eruptions. 

At Fields Avenue, bar girls and bar owners themselves hosed mud from their dance floors, sprayed the ash off their neon billboards, and opened up even to zero customers if only to perk up the place. US veterans that opted to stay helped in the famous avenue’s clean-up. 

The abandoned Clark golf course was literally dug up from several meters of sand and ash by the Angeles City golfers in a team-up with the PAF’s Clark Air Base Command. And made it playable in due time, the constant threat of ashfall providing additional degree of difficulty to their drives, pitches and putts.

So it is clichéd that familiarity breeds contempt. So it was with lahar, the dread and horror it initially brought lost with the advent of heavy rains: its scalding heat fizzled, its viscosity dissolved with the abundance of water.

Lived with lahar, the Angelenos did. And even profited from it. Where lahar flowed – at the Abacan River – enterprise flourished.

With the bridge totally destroyed, passenger vehicles loaded and offloaded commuters at each end of the gap. For them to go down the river and cross to the other side. 

Makeshift ladders of all makes – steel, aluminium, bamboo, wood – and sizes were soon ranged against both bluffs of the river to ease the ascent and descent of the commuters – for a fee of course.

To cross the river, commuters had a choice of the “Pajero” – and improvised sedan chair, and the “Patrol” – the carabao-drawn farmer’s cart locally known as gareta. Again, for a fee. 

The pumice stones belched from the volcano’s bowels became a principal source of livelihood, a backyard industry. Crushed to golf-ball size, the pumice was used in stone-washing denims. Handicrafts, ornaments, even art objects were fashioned out of pumice rock, among the more familiar were Japanese stone lanterns, ashtrays, religious images – the head of the crucified Christ, angels and cherubs – and miniature jeepneys. 

Needless to say, sand quarrying became a principal source of income in the city.

With the sense of normalcy returning to the city, there arose the need to jumpstart the still-lethargic local economy. Thus newly-elected Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan and his confidant, the activist Alexander Cauguiran, brainstormed Tigtigan, Terakan King Dalan.

Grounded on the defining character of Angeles as an entertainment city, the Mardi Gras-like festivity – of street music and dancing, of food and drinks – ably delivered to the nation and to the world: “Happy Days are Here Again.” 

A happy beginning

AS THE phoenix birthed itself from its own ashes, to rise, to soar to greater heights of glory, so did Angeles City.

Clark Air Base reborn as a freeport zone. Its airport well on its way to full transformation as the country’s premier international gateway.

Manufacturing abounding.

Foreign investments rising. The Koreans keep on coming. Fields Avenue upgrading.

The service industry – hotels, restaurants, entertainment – rebounding. New ones, like business process outsourcing, aborning.

Shopping malls sprouting.

Thousands of jobs opening.

Greater opportunity spelling prosperity. A promised land of plenty.

More than a happy ending to the Pinatubo story, this is yet a new beginning for Angeles City. 

(Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph (2011), edited by Bong Z. Lacson)

 

Pinatubo at 35/Part 2 : The call to rise

“E KO magmalun, mibangun ya ing Pampanga.”

The exhortation of Governor Bren Z. Guiao for his people to end their collective grief, rise from despair, and believe in a renascent Pampanga brought the first ray of hope in the wake of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions.

It was the faintest flicker of hope though, the Kapampangan trapped in the most desperate straits: damned in a wasteland of buried homes and broken dreams, doomed in a landscape of death and desolation.

Beyond PR savvy – of which Guiao was a guru – the slogan was founded on the governor’s unwavering faith in the Kapampangan character: of grit and resiliency, that have served him well in rising from every adversity, be it socio-politico-economic, as in the agrarian unrest, the Marcos dictatorship and the communist rebellion; or natural, as in the floods that perennially devastated the croplands and aqua farms of the province and damaged its infrastructure.

Sharing that strong faith were motley groups of men and women crisscrossing the economic, political and religious divide to find common cause in the salvation of Pampanga. Their advocacy most manifest in the antecedent “save” to their movements.

Thus, it came to pass, when the national government all but gave the actual order for the forcible evacuation of the province, in its pragmatic rationalization on the futility of fighting nature, the “save movements” mobilized the population in vehement opposition to any scheme of abandoning Pampanga and relocating its people.

More horrifying than the physical devastation of the province by the eruptions and the subsequent lahar rampages was the irretrievable loss of the Kapampangan soul that a hegira would most certainly bring about.

“There was a lot of sentiment underneath it all, an attachment to the old hometown, its past, its people, the memories, and everything it stood for.” Thus wrote a noted columnist of the motivation of the Kapampangan to stand his ground – literally on murky, shifting volcanic sand – and fight with all his might for his very life.

This is the pith of the Pinatubo story: a tragedy transcended by the triumph of the indomitable Kapampangan spirit.

(Foreword of Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit (2008), Edited by Bong Z. Lacson)

 

Pinatubo at 35/Part 1: It was the worst of times

 

JUNE 10, 1991. Angeles City awakened to its worst nightmare: the American dream was over.

Dashed was the hope – against hope – that GI Joe would stay, come what may. A belief borne by the new concrete wall around the base perimeter that had just been completed, the frenzied base housing construction seen as a sure sign of increased troop deployment, and the second runway built reportedly to serve as alternative landing site for the space shuttle Columbia. All coming to nought.

Before stunned eyes passed the very end of the city’s economic being: By car, bus, truck, American servicemen and their dependents started their exodus from Clark – jamming the North Luzon Expressway in a three-mile-long convoy – to Subic where US warships and troop transports awaited them for the long journey home.

Their departure from Clark was for the Americans a less than stoic acceptance of the impending repudiation by the Philippine Senate of the bases treaty – to ultimately come in September – than a hurried, harried flight from certain catastrophe.

June 11. “16,000 evacuated from Clark” bannered the Stars and Stripes, with the subhead: “Major eruption feared from Mount Pinatubo volcano.”

The rumblings of the hitherto hardly known volcano starting to get frequenter and stronger by the hour.

June 12. Philippine Independence Day. For the first time in 90 years, Angeles City was thoroughly free of a foreign occupation force. The meaning of the day though was utterly lost to Mayor Antonio Abad Santos whose speech before the city hall alternated between carping – “overacting,” he called the American abandonment of the base, and comforting – that the greater number of Angelenos need not panic, being outside Pinatubo’s immediate 10-kilometer radius that was initially tagged as danger zone.

Thunderous explosions cut Abad Santos in mid-speech, a giant plume of ash shot up 20 kilometers in the sky, immediately followed a rain of hot ash and pumice stones. It was 8:51 in the morning.

Panic – people froze in their track, eyes in the sky and mouth agape, shocked and awed by nature’s might.

Then pandemonium – the rush for home, hither and thither like headless chickens, amid the cacophony of frightened shrieks, nervous prayers, screeching tires and blaring horns.

With the acrid smell of sulphur wafting in the ash-laden air, masks – surgical and industrial – ran out in the city’s drug and hardware stores. The surplus biochemical masks from Desert Storm which found their way to the PX stalls of Dau and Nepo Mart had been snagged, wholesale, by some very enterprising profiteer much earlier. 

Braving the cloud of ash, President Cory Aquino flew by helicopter to Clark to see the situation first hand, and dropped by the Angeles City High School where the eruption’s very first evacuees of 2,000, mostly Aeta tribesmen, have taken refuge.

“This could only be the beginning.” So warned Dr. Raymundo S. Punongbayan, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) of the June 12 eruptions.

June 13. Phivolcs recorded more eruptions, the volcano gushing greater clouds of ash and gases 25 kilometers in the sky. “Phenomenal eruptions,” Punongbayan called them, and declared: “This is already the Big Bang. I can’t see any other eruption that will exceed this.”

June 14. Dark clouds blanketed the city, ominously dimming the garish neon lights of Balibago.

June 15. A much Bigger Bang that proved Punongbayan’s declaration deadly wrong.

The Great Eruption that turned bright day – starting at 8:15 in the morning – to darkest night. The roll of thunder, the flash of lightning, the rain of ash and stones, and the tremors of the ground foreboding the very end of days.

The city’s secondary economic lifeline – next only to Clark Air Base – furniture and handicraft manufacturing totally collapsed, literally, from the weight of ashfall: Factories – roofs, beams, posts and walls – crashing down on machines, equipment, supplies and finished products.

Collapsed too, as many houses in the city, was the roof of the Philippine Rabbit Bus terminal downtown, killing two waiting passengers and injuring scores of others. Later in the day, the city’s very icon of the finest Chinese cuisine – Shanghai De Luxe Restaurant – burned to the ground after its roof collapsed on the liquefied petroleum gas tanks in its kitchen. 

By 2 in the afternoon, steaming mudflows – soon to enter the lexicon as the terrifying “lahar” – sprang from the foot of Pinatubo, rampaged through the Abacan River, destroying in succession Friendship Bridge that led to Clark, Hensonville Spillway, Abacan Bridge, where MacArthur Highway traversed and Pandan Bridge that led to Magalang. Scouring the riverbank and gobbling up houses and buildings, including the remnants of the collapsed Angeles City General Hospital. 

It was the city’s first taste of the devastating power of lahar – a horrific byword sending people to higher ground at the slightest drop of rain.

West of the city, the lahar-swollen Mancatian River swallowed its eponymous bridge cutting off Angeles City from Porac town. Mudflows overtopped the Sapang Balen Creek and spread steadily across the city proper. The public market and commercial area of San Nicolas and the business district, indeed the very heart of the city, Sto. Rosario where city hall, the “big church,” the enclaves of the rich, as well as the city’s and Central Luzon’s biggest private school, Holy Angel College were all sited, all inundated by steaming mud. 

There, a long-established tale belied: As the elevation of Angeles City is levelled with the very spire of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Fernando, any flooding in the city would mean the capital town under at least 30 feet of water.

On Doomsday itself, no flooding was recorded in San Fernando.

With supplications to the Almighty drowned by the rumble of the volcano, with the onslaught of mudflows and the rain of ash unabating, it was hegira for the Angelenos.

All the roads leading south of the city were filled with dazed and dazzled refugees, on foot, in cars, on buses, on truck: seeking relative safety in the homes of relatives and friends, finding temporary shelters in evacuation centers, the first of which was Amoranto Stadium in Quezon City provided for by Mayor Brigido Simon, Jr., a Kapampangan himself, who also brought buses to the very ramp of the Angeles exit of the North Luzon Expressway to ferry more evacuees.

Buried in ashes, reduced to a virtual ghost town, Angeles City and its twin basetown, which also bore the initial brunt of the eruptions, made easy picking for the moralists’ sermon of the wrath of God heaped upon Sodom and Gomorrah. The host cities to the US military bases long known as deeply mired in decadence and debauchery.

But erased from the face of earth like the biblical sin cities, Angeles City refused to be.

(Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph (2011), edited by Bong Z. Lacson)