Typhoon Preparedness

One anecdote that I forgot to add is about typhoon preparedness.  There is only so much you can prepare for when 180km winds are heading towards your house made of sheet metal, boards and bamboo.  One picture that will forever stick in my mind is a man sitting in his 'kitchen' next to a refrigerator and no walls around him, as if his house was picked up and put somewhere else. One minute you are in your house and the next minute it's gone and you're sitting in an open field.

After one of the worst typhoons to hit my area about 8 years ago, the area was devastated. Think war zone. Floods, wind damage, landslides, etc. after the storm, people rebuilt.  Of course, the storms  are strong and the damage is very bad, but the damage is worse because there is no zoning and houses are built out of very weak materials.  And so, they gathered their sheet metal, boards and other materials that blew away and rebuilt their homes from the same materials.  However, this started fights. Neighbors accused neighbors of stealing pieces of roofs that belonged to them or using their wall as their wall now.  I noticed after this typhoon people were rebuilding with the same materials again- flattening out sheet metal, taking nails out of water-logged wood, but no fighting. Long story short, instead of securing their homes so that they don't blow away, people labelled all the parts of their homes so that when they did get knocked over or blown away, no one would steal them. A different definition of disaster preparedness.