A celebratory atmosphere will definitely be absent in the north of the Filipino island of Mindanao this year, as thousands of families affected by the tropical storm that lashed the island last weekend have yet to recover from the devastation that left more than 900 dead – mostly children - and houses destroyed.

As of Monday, Philippine government officials were scrambling to deal with the piles of bloated dead bodies that had already started to rot, hoping to head off the spread of diseases that could further aggravate the situation.

The sheer number of dead indicates the people oblivious of the might of tropical storm Washi, which turned out to be one of the most deadly storms to hit the Philippines in recent years.

Social media in the Philippines have been flooded with comments lambasting the state weather bureau for the lack of detailed information provided about the severity of the storm.

Data obtained from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission revealed that the affected area received more rainfall in a single day than they usually get in a month. This explains the sudden rise of water that washed away houses in the dead of the night while people slept.

Some blame the high casualty rate on the complacency of people in Northern Mindanao. The area is not part of the country’s so-called “typhoon belt,” and is rarely hit by floods, so many residents did not take the advisory seriously enough.

Others noted that national media, pre-occupied with the politics surrounding the recently announced corruption investigation into the former president,  did not report much about the expected scale of the storm.

One national newspaper in the Philippines argued that a variety of factors had led to the high death toll - a deadly combinations of the “absence of a flood warning, high tide, darkness and a false sense of security..”

It’s frightening to realize that a country which is being struck by about 20 major storms annually, can finds itself unprepared for such a storm.

With years of experience in weathering such storms, the Philippines government should have been “expert” in dealing with this kind of natural disaster.

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