By BEHN FER. HORTALEZA, JR.

ONE of the most jarring consequence of disasters –natural calamities, if you may — is the cutoff of communications, or at least the difficulty of accessing known help or assistance numbers for the latest information when you need it most.

This problem was brought home in very telling measure by no less than the reported inability of President Arroyo to check on the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) itself when she was trying to monitor disaster developments in the country from Fresno in California where she is making a three-day working visit to the United States.

The high volume of internet traffic accessing the site appeared to make the NDCC website unavailable, the President herself noted.

“Because yesterday,” PGMA said, “we were not able to get in touch with NDCC. Even now, we are in Malacanang, we are still not able to get through,” she added as quoted in a PIA Dispatch dated yesterday.

She asked the National Computer Center (NCC) and the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) to ensure that the NDCC website remains operational at all times.

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In a life-and-death situation, one of the worst realizations,one that can send fear really running down the spine of a helpless disaster victim is to know that he can’t communicate with anyone. To say that he’s alive or needing urgent medical attention or to inform would-be rescuers his location.

With modern communication facilities all available and at one’s fingertips today, still there comes an unexpected time when you become, to your horror, dead incommunicado. For various reasons like, poor signal, heavy call traffic or yes, dead batteries. Smoke signals would be fine of course, if you were any bit oriented with the ways of American Indians. Or tapping a Morse Code message thru whatever means available, if you were ever in the Navy once. But you can’t do that all the time.

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And so, in today’s real world where natural calamities come more frequently than ever before, someone should be coming up with a gadget or something that opens up otherwise clogged connections for extremely urgent situations or develop a measure by which – without using instruments and equipment that depend on electronic cables, wires and switches – sends out signals that can exactly pinpoint one’s location and the degree of danger or devastation in a given area to others in the outside. A homing device, sort of, as the techno savvy term it .

Whistleblower Renato Lozada had mentioned something like this to a fellow communication expert he contacted while he was being driven around by his “escorts.” Remember his word “triangulate.” Now, if such technical capability were to be made available and common to all, not just a select few…

This is where, and how, the dogs really beat us homo sapiens. They can sniff their way to a hidden quarry, no fancy instruments, no costly procedures, just their plain, old noses.

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Dagupenos and Pangasinenses can thank their lucky stars they’ve been spared another agony – generally – when typhoon Frank blew into town. With weather forecasters saying the eye of the typhoon was passing very close to Dagupan City Sunday, everyone here was on tenterhooks, listening intently to the whistling of the wind and eyeing their roofs with some dread.

Frank thankfully chose to go howling by the coastlines of western Pangasinan instead and out the South China Sea towards Taiwan, opting away (or more aptly, guided away by an Unseen Hand) from the city and the environs that still bore the devastation wrought by earlier visitor, Cosme. Easy does it, Frank!

They will be the last to admit it of course, but our disaster coordinating councils must have been so fearful of another Cosme-like disaster happening in their hands — with only so much to offer by way of real relief and rehabilitation to victims – they may have just covered their eyes, squirrel-like, and prayed that it won’t be as devastating.

Wish granted. Reprieve period extended. But for how long till the next Big One comes again?
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With the media-friendly Sandra Frias, Cenpelco officer and spokesperson gone to eternal rest, her brutal death still unsolved to date, the Central Pangasinan Electric Cooperative may now not only be struggling with a huge physical and financial challenge of restoring electricity to the remaining half of their customer base but also of maintaining a constant update of their work progress in media.

Frias has certainly given a face to the job dimensions of Cenpelco, its little successes, its difficulties, its hopes like no one else before her ever had. She had a way of exuding confidence under stress while she answered questions in interviews.

Cenpelco should not just be concerned about the bad power problem in its hands but also of seeing to it, following up with the authorities, the progress of investigation into her case – which, at this point, appears to be work-related. It is the least her fellow Cenpelco officers can do in honor of her memory.

The NEA (National Electrification Administration) itself should do no less – and get to the bottom of why such an employee-asset had to die that way and who was or were behind her murder.