24 hour plus Manila Rain Event…..Rain
Event turns out to be Typhoon Nesat (aka Pedring)
September 26, 2011
Quezon City—Despite working against a 12 hour time swing, I
managed to crank out more stories in the last 9 days here than I usually do
working my freelance gig from New York’s Upper West Side. I am rustling after
stories like a bear getting ready for the winter hibernation—I know I will lose
a work day or two due to jetlag returning to JFK, so I am working in over-drive
now.
A major factor is that the news story gods have been kind. They
turned on the spigot for some really solid story ideas—just when your humble correspondent
needed to get cracking.
At the same time, the weather gods seem to feel that I have
done my fair share work for they decided to pour enough rain onto Luzon, the
isle that is home to Manila—that the power company shutdown the works. It has
rained here for a day straight and the morning arrived with strong winds (your
veteran hurricane watcher would have rated them at around 50 mph) which tore at
the roof of the Violago home and managed to put a gash in the upstairs ceiling.
This was all happening two hours before my story deadline—and
no power meant no way to feed my story, which was back from the editor and just
awaiting my voice for the various versions of the radio packages. Since, I file
using Skype, no internet meant no phone to let another producer know to pitch
in
I woke up two hours prior to deadline to be sure I had
time, but I had not planned for this.
Mrs V must have
spotted the bullets of sweat forming at my brow, for she kindly asked Mr V to
set off on a mission to find gas for the generator.
The deadline gods decided to smile upon us through the
rain: In rapid action, Mr V found gas and made it back by 830—he had the
generator cranking juice by 8:45, and I was able to announce, edit, and upload the
short version of radio “wrap” in time for the East Coast Story Feed at 9pm ET.
This was one of those one-take situations, where you had to cut it live on
tape, because there was no time left for re-takes. The old hurricane “improve”
skills kicked in nicely.
Next, I uploaded the longer versions of my radio report for
stations to use Tuesday morning. It turned out to be a pretty
interesting story
concerning a federal discrimination suit filed against Mayor Bloomberg and the
city for allegedly failing to properly prepare to evacuate people with disabilities
during Hurricane Irene.
One reason I had to hold off on voicing the story until dawn
here was that we were awaiting a response from the Mayor, and my co-producer
Mark was kind enough to insert that response while I caught some precious
sleep.
That work was now complete, I thought about heading back to
bed, but the generator was still whirring away. No sense letting good power go
to waste, I reasoned. As fate would have
it, I already had recorded both of the interviews on Skype that I needed for
Wednesday’s story. So, I wrote the draft and got the copy and sound uploaded
for Wednesday’s story, so an editor will be able to review the work. In the
meantime, I will need to touch base with one of the story sources for a brief
fact check.
Reporter (tropics) Rule number one is when you have power,
and web access, make sure you use it, because one never knows—when they will be
restored and reliable enough to get the next round of work done.
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Typhoon Nesat (source) CNN
Since, I am writing this Blog style, I can now happily admit
that I buried the “lede.” It was not until mid-afternoon that Vince informed
me, the rain event was actually the outer bands of a Typhoon Nesat…which
carries the moniker of Pedring in the Phillipines—which pretty much means
Peter. The Asian weather folks and most of the world will have a different name
for the storm—but there is in fact only the one typhoon—which gets a new name
when it crosses the Philippines.
I have been so involved keeping tabs on my beats in the
states that I had not even glanced at the local news. Vince says we were
expecting rain, but not the typhoon. He says, they normally track north once
they hit land, but this one was so strong it just cut straight across Luzon,
and Manila got hit hard in spots. One river is near over-flowing and if it tops
it will flood a highly populated part of the city that saw water around 9 feet
deep in a recent typhoon. Early signs are this was quite bad in spots, first reports of deaths have it at seven dead and likely to go higher.
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When we aren’t fending off typhoons, much of this trip has
been spent at Vince’s new office where he has twenty employees who are doing
research and translation work
For those who know Manila, his office is located in a high
rise at West Ave at the corner of Quezon Ave.
His staff is mostly comprised of recent graduates in
language study at the University of the Philippines and they are eager for the
work and fun to be around.
BTW, this is my third trip to the Philippines and my second
typhoon, so I guess I still have the reporter’s knack of being around stuff
when it happens. As my old sidekick (Fischman) liked to recall, the one time I
went to Rome the Pope died (for the inquiring mind—John Paul I).
