Tropical storm “Ondoy,” after mercilessly lashing out the major parts of Luzon, including Metro Manila last Saturday continues to be the subject of widespread tragedy and stress related by the victims themselves.

The victims were a cross-section of Philippine society – both the rich and poor, young and old, celebrities and the unheard of, from the high-end residential enclaves to the squatters’ shanties of the impoverished.

Their dire consequences were widely reported in the media, complete with live coverage of the dramas unfolding before the very eyes of shocked audiences.

One of them was the agonizing experience of TV and film actress Cristine Reyes who was heard on television and radio begging for help to save her and the young children of her kin as they struggled to survive atop the roof of their house under heavy rain and ghastly winds.

And it was only one of the extreme cases that figured in the much-talked about “Ondoy” catastrophe. In one incident, three people were reported killed, including a four-year-old girl, when a concrete wall collapsed on their sleeping quarters in Barangay Pinyahan, Quezon City.

In another, the doctor-sister of Justice Remedios Salazar-Fernando of the Court of Appeals got trapped in her clinic while ministering to the needs of her 750 patients without food or water at the height of “Ondoy’s” wrath.

Still in another, the rampaging waters carried away three people while a man was electrocuted in Vito Cruz in Pasay City.

Earlier, reports said more than 1,800 people were forced to flee their homes in Metro Manila and took refuge in evacuation centers.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council chaired by Defense Secretary Gilberto A. Teodoro, said the provinces of Aurora, Quezon, Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya, and Pangasinan had been placed under a state of calamity, together with Tarlac, Zambales, Pampanga, Bulacan, Rizal, Quezon, Isabela, Mountain Province, Ifugao, Benguet, La Union, Ilocos Sur, Laguna, Oriental Mindoro, Mindoro Occidental, Marinduque, Camarines Norte, and Bataan.

In declaring Metro Manila under a state of calamity, the NDCC and the Office of Civil Defense said the rains brought by the tropical storm “Ondoy” caused the “worst flooding in the capital in more than 20 years.”

A report said, the equivalent of one month’s rain fell on Metro Manila in less than five hours.

Maybe so.

In Fairview, Quezon City, for instance, although less reported in the media, a lot of “Ondoy’s” rain waters rushed through as if with vengeance, inundating the place and rendering many residents shaken and homeless.

This was particularly true along lower Mustang Street where tons of rampaging flood waters made the whole place and beyond a virtual sea of despair and disaster, wrecking homes and properties and forcing their owners to flee and seek refuge elsewhere.

Fleeing from their homes was a portrait of drama in itself as some of them, including the children and the elderly passed through their fire escapes onto the roofs of neighboring houses.

They left their homes with nothing except the clothes on their backs, shivering and looking helpless.

One of the places of refuge was the newly-constructed four-storey building at the corner of Mustang and Malibu streets run by kindly foreign nun for out-of-school youths.

It was here where Mustang residents found themselves together relating their stories in disbelief of how the flood waters just came so suddenly as if to purposely shake and shock them out of their wits.

Many of them have been Fairview residents for as much as 30 to 40 years and there never was anything nearly like it.

I should know – I am from Mustang.

(zhern_218@yahoo.com)