Sitting on the boundary of the Pacific’s Ring of Fire, the Philippines is particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Volcanic activity, earthquakes, and tsunamis are all real and present risks across the vast island chain.
Typhoons, on average, batter the country more than twenty times a year. Though they are comparatively easy to predict, the regularity and ferocity of these storms call for extensive planning and an understanding across Filipino society that when the typhoon hits, you batten down the hatches and stay inside.
In September came tropical storm Bualoi, followed almost immediately by super typhoon Ragasa, which killed more than a dozen people. Ragasa forced hundreds of thousands more to evacuate and destroyed critical infrastructure across enormous areas before moving northwest toward Taiwan, Hong Kong, and southern China.
In the aftermath of the storm, people took to the streets. The timing of Bualoi and Ragasa could hardly have been worse. They struck with the country reeling from a scandal, an act of betrayal by those responsible for protecting the welfare and livelihoods of Filipinos.
Politicians had been lining their pockets with public funds, money that was supposed to have been spent on flood defense projects, to mitigate against and lessen the impact of deadly climactic events — the very kind of disaster they had just seen.
The plot, details of which first emerged in July, implicates lawmakers in siphoning off huge sums of taxpayers’ money. According to government officials, between 2023 and 2025 as much as 70 percent of…
Auteur: Ben Morris
