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)

 

Sans epal, no ayuda

“NO PUBLIC officials holding elective positions, electoral candidates, politicians, political partners, or any of their representatives, except for officials having direct administrative and executive authority over the implementing agency, shall influence, be present in, participate in, or take part in the actual distribution of any cash assistance and other forms of financial aid.”

Thus, states Section 19 of RA 12314 or the 2026 General Appropriations Act.

Further, Section 20 also prohibits the display and affixing of the name, picture, image, motto, logo, color motif, initials or other symbol or graphic representation associated with any public official, whether elected or appointed, on signboards for all government programs, activities and projects. 

Covered by these prohibitions are the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s protective services for individuals and families in difficult circumstances, including the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), Ayuda para sa Kapos ang Kita Program (AKAP), and the Assistance to Individuals in Crisis Situation (AICS) Program; the Department of Labor and Employment’s Tulong Panghanapbuhay sa Ating Disadvantaged/Displaced Workers Program (TUPAD); and the Department of Health’s Medical Assistance for Indigent and Financially Incapacitated Patients Program (MAIFIP). 

“Hindi ko papupuntahin iyong mga paymaster namin at iyong mga social worker namin habang nandoon iyong mga politiko. I think that’s a proactive measure,” Social Welfare and Development Secretary Rex Gatchalian himself declared sometime in January 2026 during a briefing on these very provisions in the 2026 GAA.

Emphatically iterating: “Well, again if (politicians) gatecrash, we can stop (the distribution). Our social workers…will not allow themselves to be used for political gains of anybody.”

What the law sought to prohibit, prospered in its very practice.

So, has there ever been a time since these prohibitions were publicized that politicians, in all levels of governance, were ever absent from all ayuda dole outs, be they 4Ps, AICS, MAIFIP, TUPAD, Cash Relief Assistance, and – in these times of oil price surges – TUPAD Tuloy Pasada to jeepney and tricycle operators and drivers’ associations?

Why, with the barangay and sangguniang kabataan elections waving, prospective candidates who have affinities – familial, entrepreneurial, or political – to the sitting mayors have made themselves all too visible, and audible – some are reportedly even given time to talk – in ayuda payouts.

Sadly, we have yet to hear of one instance that social workers stopped aid distribution due to a politician’s presence.

Shame.

Green palette

scorching light of

midafternoon sun

verdancy’s grandeur

wilts not.

Hann Reserve. New Clark City. May 21, 2026. 

Doggoned Senate

 

                                                                                            YouTube grab

THOSE OF age in 1997 may well still remember Wag the Dog.

For one, it starred Hollywood A-listers Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman. 

More worth unforgetting though is its plot – a Washington DC spinmeister distracts the electorate from a sex scandal (shades of the Bill-Monica affair) a few days before the election by hiring a film producer to…well, produce a bogus war with Albania.

The movie did not birth the idiom “wag the dog,” having been in the American lexicon since the 1870s, originating from “the tail wagging the dog.” Nonetheless, it was the movie that really made it an operative word in politics and communications, spawning the meaning “to start a war or military operation to divert political attention away from yourself.”        

General usage now has “wag the dog” meaning to create a situation to divert the people’s attention from what is otherwise of greater significance, concern or interest to them. 

Wag the dog. That is precisely what I saw in the acoustics shootout at the Senate last night. No, I have absolutely no pretensions to expertise in forensics, at best being an armchair generalist. Still, the tell-tale signs are all there.  

Doggone it.

Cancelling Abad Santos

MAY 7 is a special non-working holiday in the Pampanga and Angeles City in commemoration of the martyrdom of the Kapampangan hero and former Chief Justice Jose Abad Santos.

In the long bygone days of the boomers, the day was celebrated with endless school plays of the last hours of Abad Santos highlighted by his admonition to his son Pepito to “show these people that you are brave…that not everyone is given the opportunity to die for his country.” So honored was Abad Santos then that his martyrdom was even parallelled with Jose Rizal’s as greatest epochs in Philippine history, the Spanish Colonization for the latter, the Japanese Occupation for the former.

That was then, a long dead past.

For the past decades now, the remembrance of Abad Santos, much less memorializing his heroism, has not gone beyond the perfunctory wreath-laying and rhetoric on his official death date at the foot of his monuments – only four very visible in the whole of Pampanga: at the Provincial Capitol grounds, at Heroes Hall in the City of San Fernando, fronting the Museo ning Angeles, and of late, at the northbound entry of the North Luzon Expressway in San Fernando. 

So what school, public or private, elementary or secondary, vocational or college, in San Fernando, in the whole Pampanga for that matter, has been named in honor of Abad Santos? 

Ah yes, there was but one: Jose Abad Santos High School in 1966 per act of Congress via a measure sponsored by 1^st District Rep. Juanita L. Nepomuceno at the time when the province had only two congressional districts. Which in 1991 reverted to its old Pampanga High School, courtesy of 3^rd District Rep. Oscar S. Rodriguez, a PHS alumnus.     

Why, at the very demolition of the Abad Santos ancestral home just off the old public market in the late 1980s (early 1990s?), not even a whispered whimper of a protest was heard from the town officials or from local heritage advocates, despite the site proudly sporting the marker of the National Historical Institute as the birthplace of the hero.

Why, but for an afterthought of civic and business groups was the Gapan-San Fernando-Olongapo Road was also named Jose Abad Santos Avenue, albeit limited in usage to the San Fernando stretch, and the Department of Public Works and Highways still referencing to it in its maintenance contracts as GSO. 

Why, even the P1,000 bill that bore his image, along with fellow WWII martyrs Vicente Lim, and Josefa Llanes Escoda, have been replaced by the new “plastic” P1,000 bill featuring the endangered Philippine eagle.

Alas, to the dustbin of history has Abad Santos, along with most of our heroes, been veritably consigned. Unhappy is the land without heroes, so ‘tis cliched. But damned is that that willfully forgets them – being part of the lessons of history that Santayana admonished about.