‘There is a world where this couldn’t have been anticipated. This isn’t that world.’
When Ernest Ocasiones woke up before dawn on Tuesday, November 4, the flood that entered his room was ankle-deep. By the time he called for his children and swung open the front door, it had reached his knees. By the time they got to their car, it was at their waist.
When I asked him how far he believed the water made it when he had fled his home, he pointed to a spot on the wall taller than himself.
He thought it was the end of the world.
Hello there. I’m Aidan Bernales, a community growth and development specialist at Rappler. I don’t usually find myself on the ground. I do my work at home, where a stable internet connection is all I need to play my part in the publication, finding ways for our stories to reach more readers like you.
But when Typhoon Tino (Kalmaegi) hit my hometown of Cebu, the story found its way to me.
I watched an entire riverside community disappear into the Butuanon River, which runs behind my house and caused the car pileup you’ve probably seen online.
When the flood subsided, I returned to where it had overflowed. Not a single makeshift home stood. A chunk of the riprap meant to protect the area was bitten off by the current. All that was left was a hollow cement frame filled with sand and gravel dredged from the riverbed, nowhere near as tall as or sturdy enough to withstand a flood of that proportion.
Rappler’s regions reporter, John Sitchon, had covered that same river and its weak flood control structures in September, when a single flooding incident damaged the ripraps built only a year before. He wrote then that it was a “race against time” to fix the project before the next disaster.
Clearly, that time has run out.
There is a world where this couldn’t have been anticipated. SunStar Cebu, one of Rappler’s NewsCollabPH partners, reported that, on the morning of November 4, Cebu received 183 millimeters of rainfall — more than a month’s worth of rain in just a single day. It was the deadliest typhoon of 2025.
How could we have fought that? That rainfall felt like a targeted assassination by nature. Put that in the wake of a magnitude 6.9 earthquake, and it’s a punishment straight out of the Old Testament.
That was what I saw in Cotcot, Liloan, one of Cebu’s hardest-hit towns. With no internet, I took my reporting offline, speaking to emergency responders in a muddy, candle-lit barangay hall. They had aimed for zero casualties, but it was nearly impossible to achieve. Bodies were swept down from the mountains, homes were wiped clean, cars flung into each other like toys, and scores of people were still missing. By dusk, they had barely rested before returning to search for the dead in the dark. (WATCH: Liloan struggles to recover after deadly floods)
They all agreed on one thing: They had never seen anything like it before.
Rappler columnist Raymund E. Narag credits this disaster to a “culmination of years of white-collar crimes,” where corruption and profit triumphed over safety. Clearly, that sentiment rings true as charges pile up against Cebuano mayors who reportedly vacationed in London the week their towns drowned, while the Department of Environment and Natural Resources probes a celebrity architect whose Banaue-inspired hillside project may have contributed to flooding in neighboring barangays.
As I said, there is a world where this couldn’t have been anticipated. This isn’t that world.
People demanded answers, to know what was happening to their country, and Rappler was there to report them. Sitchon returned to Liloan to find families still waiting for aid. Photographer Jacqueline Hernandez documented the burials. Researcher Shay Du tracked down the contractors in the Visayas towns where Tino was deadliest.
We’re still at it. Our developing stories page continues to collect updates. Our relief page connects donors to organizations providing food and essentials. Every story, photo, and update you see takes hours of work, often in dangerous and exhausting conditions.
It was supposed to be the end of the world. Yet, somehow, the days kept passing. New storms, like Super Typhoon Uwan (Fung-wong), entered, engulfed, and exited. Political scandals broke. Christmas keeps coming closer. Soon, Tino will become a memory, just another retired name from a typhoon list, reduced to numbers and infographics.
But for those who lost everything, for the daughter still searching for her mother, for the families who have to start from scratch, this story doesn’t end. And Rappler is taking it upon itself to make sure the devastation endured is never forgotten.
We’ll continue to tell these stories, to hold those in power into account, and to keep the memory of this tragedy alive.
If you believe in journalism that doesn’t look away even when the world is drowning, support Rappler by joining Rappler+ or donating to our investigative fund. – Rappler.com