Angeleños’ commemorate “triumph over tragedy”

By Carlo Lorenzo J. Datu

Sunday 17th of June 2012

ANGELES CITY, Pampanga June 17 (PIA) -- The local chief executive of Angeles City on Friday exhorted Angeleños to remember the significant event in history when they have triumphed over the tragedy that hit the city twenty one years ago wrought by the eruption of the once slumbered volcano.

According Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo almost destroyed everything in Angeles City.

“While we recall the anguish, despair and hopelessness, we will also celebrate the triumph, the success, the resurrection and the rising from the ashes of the Angeleños,” Pamintuan said.

With the constant threat of lahar flows burying the city and erasing it from the maps, aggravated by the departure of the American forces in Clark Air Base, Angeles was considered a doomed city.

“Our young people today, and first time visitors of Angeles, would never imagine the travails and tragedies that the people of Angeles faced during that time,” Pamintuan said.

He recalled that the Angeleños had very little idea about lahar.

“I remember I made a call, as acting mayor then, for us to fortify the banks of the Abacan River, the possible path of the lahar. I thought that if the lahar breached the banks of the river, it will spill over to the nearby communities and ruin our city all the more. I even asked for volunteers,” Pamintuan recalled.

He said that the most spectacular sight and memory of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption was not the giant mushroom of ash that rose kilometers into the atmosphere but rather the more than 20,000 Angeleños who were in several parallel lines at both banks of the Abacan, some with picks and shovels, and the rest passing on sandbags which were piled at the river walls to reinforce them from the flow of lahar.

“But the spirit of the Angeleños never faltered. Through their resiliency, strength of character, trust in their leaders and faith in God, they survived, stood up and moved forward. They have turned tragedy into triumph,” the mayor concluded.

Regarded as the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century, Mount Pinatubo’s climactic explosion happened on June 15, 1991. Its ashfalls reached as far as the Indian Ocean.

Timely forecasts of the eruption by scientists from the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology and the US Geological Survey enabled people living near the volcano to evacuate to safer distances, thus saving thousands of lives. (WLB/CLJD-PIA 3)