At the conclusion of “Disaster in the Philippines, Part 1: Earthquake,” the Mount Pinatubo volcano was awakening from 500 years of slumber. Spurred by ominous alerts from a team of U.S. and Filipino volcanologists, Maj Gen William A. Studer, the commander of the Thirteenth Air Force, ordered all 15,000 people, except mission essential personnel, to evacuate Clark Air Base. The exodus started on Monday, June 10, 1991, at 6:00 a.m. My story, drawn from letters I sent home and from an interview I did with Lin, my journalist sister, is just a tiny bit part in an epic drama that devastated the Philippines and altered the global climate. A more comprehensive account, and my source for fact checking this story, is C. R. Anderegg’s book, The Ash Warriors.
I threw my “bug-out” bag, packed as directed with at least three days’ worth of clothing, toiletries and important documents, into my four-wheel drive Montero and joined the last group of cars lined up at the flightline at 9:00 a.m. The security police gave me bottled water and a few snacks and directed me into the creeping parade of vehicles headed southwest to the U. S. Naval Base Subic Bay. The monsoon rains were late, and the nearly grid-locked caravan on the two-lane highway stewed in the tropical heat. Roughly a distance of 48 miles, the drive took almost five hours. Another long line awaited at the Subic processing center, already overwhelmed by a hoard of tired and disoriented evacuees. I got a bunk in a single officers’ quarters room with two other roommates. Subic families took some folks into their homes; others ended up sleeping on cots in gyms, on mattresses on the chapel floor, or wherever they could find space. Pets that weren’t left at Clark AB, including at least one rabbit, were herded into a makeshift kennel.
I signed into the command center set up by our hospital team at the U. S. Naval Hospital, Subic Bay and immediately was put to work unloading several busloads of medical records rescued from Clark AB. The records were a jumbled mess, a nightmare for the admin clerks to sort out. The next morning, I reported for work at the hospital emergency room (ER), staffing up the Subic crew of Navy nurses and corpsmen struggling to cope with the increased patient load. Around 8:50 a.m., someone ran into the waiting room and yelled, “The volcano just erupted!”
The hospital sat on a hill with the entrance of the ER facing Mount Pinatubo. We could see a mushroom-shaped cloud, like an atomic bomb explosion, billowing from the volcano. The prevailing winds unexpectedly blew the cloud away from Clark AB and it spread toward us, dimming the sun and dropping ash on San Miguel, north of Subic. Wednesday, the volcano erupted again, although not as intensely as the day before. This time we were caught in some of the ash fall, gray with the consistency of fine sand. Little did we know that these and a few subsequent eruptions were just the opening acts to the climatic big bang.
June 16th, “Black Saturday,” as Col Anderegg christened it, dawned at Subic with heavy clouds obscuring our view of Mount Pinatubo. The major eruption the volcanologists had feared roared forth in all its fury at 5:55 a.m. By early afternoon, the sky had turned pitch black; ash and pumice rocks bombarded the base. Earthquakes shook the buildings. Then, Typhoon Yunya rolled in from the southeast; the torrential rains (now a tropical storm) mixed with the ash, accumulating like wet concrete on everything in its path. Over-burdened tree limbs crashed to the ground; telephone and power lines were downed. The few vehicles braving the storm struggled to navigate the ash-covered road. The grit coated windshields, clogged vents, and fouled air filters; one of our ambulances wheezed to a halt, stranded on the road.
At Subic hospital, the emergency generators kicked in, enough power for lights and medical equipment, but not air conditioning. Not long after, one of the generators went down after ash was sucked into the motor. Already over-tasked, the hospital was not accepting local civilian admissions. The number of patients coming to the ER slowed as people hunkered down or could not get through the muddle of ash and debris. Reports came in that some roofs had caved in on-base and two children had been killed; several other dependents were treated for head injuries and multiple fractures.
Back in my quarters, that Black Saturday night was apocalyptic: tremors rattled the building; the storm raged with thunder and lightning; ash mixed with rain continued to plummet the base. I lay, sleepless on my bunk, as my roommate jumped out of his cot in the throes of a panic attack. He jittered about the room, moaning and praying. I was worried myself—half-awed by the power of the tumult and half-ready to bolt if the room started to come apart. Reluctant to provoke more divine wrath than we were already enduring, I let my roomie do the praying and kept my more profane thoughts to myself. Both of us managed to survive the night, although we looked much worse for wear the next morning.
The base had already lost running water on Saturday evening; the hospital’s emergency water supply lasted through Monday, then the pipes went dry. We had bottled drinking water and hand sanitizers, nothing else. The hospital ran out of clean linen. We subsisted mainly on a diet of cold cuts and canned foods like ravioli.
The most common complaints from people seeking treatment were respiratory difficulties, allergic reactions, and eye irritations from the ash. We handed out surgical masks and goggles until they ran out. As sanitation deteriorated, we began to see people with gastrointestinal problems. In the stuffy, humid inpatient ward, the patients were perspiring so much that IV catheters and bandages were dislodging because the “adhesive” tape wouldn’t stick. Making rounds, I noticed a strange spot on the tooth of a seaman snoring away with his mouth agape. When I walked over to get a closer look, a black fly buzzed off.
The officers’ quarters reeked from soured carpets, backed-up toilets, and unwashed bodies. The toilets were so bad that we bailed water from the swimming pools with trash cans and carted them back up to the rooms to flush or wash off. We’d sweat in our clothes, rinse them out and put them back on wet. Nothing dried.
On an afternoon off, I joined some of the Navy nurses down at the beach. The ash had changed the color of the water in the bay from blue to a luminous turquoise, the only swath of color in a palette of grays—the sky, the forest, the buildings—what once was a technicolor scenario now was a bleak film noir. We drank warm San Miguel beer and swam in the tepid ocean. I grabbed a bar of soap and soon discovered that bathing in salt water was not very effective—no lather, and a sticky residue coated my hide.
The battle dress uniform (BDU), was the expected garb for our humanitarian assignment in the hospital. Tired of my grubby, sweat-caked BDUs, I showed up the next morning for my shift in a set of hospital whites. The Chief Nurse stared at my fresh uniform. I thought I was going to get an earful for wearing the wrong outfit; instead, beaming, she gushed, “Bless your heart! I’m so glad to see that.”
Marines had been tasked to shovel the thick, heavy ash slurry off the roofs of the base structures. A large tree limb had crashed onto the roof of my Montero, parked outside the hospital. I talked a Navy Seabee, operating a front-end loader in the parking lot, into using it to lift the heavy limb off the car’s roof. As I maneuvered the SUV out from underneath the blade, the left front fender bashed into the over-sized tire of the loader. The Seabee grimaced and shook his head at my sheepish grin, but at least my car was freed.
I walked over to a small group of Negrito tribesmen who had wandered onto the base. The leader told me that several huts had collapsed in their village and a baby had died. I hired them to clean the cement-like ash coat off of the car. When I came back later, I discovered they had used sharpened bamboo sticks to scrape off the tenacious grime, gouging ruts in the paint along with it. I held my tongue; my car was already a wreck before they flayed it: what could I say?
Even before this latest disaster, Clark AB had started to draw down personnel and move operations to other bases. My original stint at Clark AB was for two years, but it had been truncated to 14 months, and I was set to transfer to Bitburg AB, Germany in August. Now, given the untenable conditions at both Clark AB and the Subic complex, a mass evacuation of non-mission essential personnel and dependents was underway. The ash had grounded flights from Subic; instead, a flotilla of Navy ships was ferrying evacuees to an air strip on the island of Cebu, about 300 miles south of Subic Bay.
My time to go hit eleven days after our evacuation to Subic. I gave the keys to my car and my quarters at Clark AB to our First Sergeant and boarded the USS Midway aircraft carrier for an overnight sail to Cebu. The sailors treated us really well—laundered our clothes, fed us a steak dinner, provided hot showers and a bunk—a welcome respite. Instead of docking at Cebu, we were flown by helicopter to the island’s airstrip; the port could not accommodate an aircraft carrier. From Cebu, we flew to Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, where we were fed and rested up on cots set up in a tent city. From Guam, I boarded a charter flight to McCord Air Force Base, Washington, where I switched to a commercial airline to Chattanooga to stay with my folks until orders came through to proceed to Bitburg.
Once I got to Bitburg, it was an onerous process to reunite with the little that was left of my worldly belongings. I had auto and renters’ insurance with USAA, a company whose hallmark is its military focus. A sour claims representative skeptically questioned me about the origins of the damage to the car (I’ll admit it sounded far-fetched), and niggled over a small, preexisting crack in the windshield. My wayward steed, shipped to Bitburg, finally arrived in November— battered and abused, but still running. I drove it to a German auto shop, where the appraiser tallied up a repair estimate that far exceeded its salvage value, which is what USAA paid me. The shop owner generously agreed to restore the car for that amount.
USAA declared my household goods “abandoned” and refused to pay for any items left behind. While I wasn’t too attached to my possessions, I had added a few artfully restored Filipino antiques to my Salvation Army style furnishings. The week after my car showed up, I got a delivery of a few household items, plus a fetid mass of moldy, mildewed clothes and books. The rest, including the fancy furniture, was jettisoned at Clark AB due to “water damage.” USAA did pay for damages in the shipment, while military claims reimbursed me for the “abandoned” items. I still wonder why the stinking, water-soaked clothes and books were good enough to ship but the more durable furniture was not? Better yet, how did my “abandoned” scuba gear get “water-damaged?”
**Featured image credit: 1991 Mount Pinatubo volcanic ash surges toward sky; Camera operator Tech Sgt. Val Gempis; U.S. National Archives – Picryl, no restrictions