JUST when everyone – well, almost everyone – was thinking and fearing earthquakes especially following the successive episodes of temblors worldwide particularly the most destructive one in China, what should come a-visiting us puny mortals in Pangasinan is a typhoon like no other in recorded history that reduced properties to shambles and people to prayers on bended knees at the height of its fury in central and western Pangasinan on Saturday early evening.

Not that anyone would prefer a typhoon over an earthquake in these calamitous times but as most weather disturbances would go, in the past, the inconvenience to normal living would usually be gradual, limited and bearable.

This one, ‘Cosme’, wasn’t meant to be so. In more or less two hours, with gale-force winds, it brought Pangasinan – more particularly its western and central part including Dagupan City – encompassingly to its knees with some P1 billion in damages at the latest estimate and some 28 persons dead.

Those of us who survived its onslaught will surely be telling and retelling their personal situations in the hours when the eye of the typhoon passed thru the province with such violent imperiousness no living thing dared venture out from the safety of homes and buildings. “The wind was not just whistling, it was howling like mad outside like a monster searching for prey,” was how one horrified resident described the windy episode.

Pangasinan has lived thru a killer earthquake in July 16, 1990. Add May 17, 2008 for a killer typhoon that has surpassed all destructive others of its kind in the past.

In God’s name, we pray we all be spared this latest display of nature’s wrath again so quickly and easily in the next months or years. It could be more than we humans can take in a lifetime.