Friday, November 8, 2013:

Since we had learned from several sources that the storm would make landfall around 3:00am, we set three alarms on synchronized clocks to go off at 2:00am.

2:00am

The alarms go off.  We got out of bed.  (Elder Oakes slept on a mattress on the floor, as usual.) We went to the bathroom in anticipation of needing to be inside of our fortress for the next ten hours. We made final preparations, gathered last-minute things, and inserted the last mattress to seal ourselves in our fort. The electricity was still on, so we kept a small electric fan inside the fort so that we would be able to stay cool since we would be in there for a long time without moving air.

3:00am

We got inside of our fort and napped by the light of a glowstick. The wind still wasn’t very strong, and the air-pressure hadn’t dropped very much. We checked the barometer and thermometer constantly. This hour was very slow.

4:00am

The wind begins to pick up and the power goes out. We get the fan out of the fort and use a small battery-powered fan to keep air circulating within the fort. The temperature inside the fort remained a constant 84.9F, which was quite comfortable considering normal air temperatures. Outside the fort, it was about 79F, which is absolutely frigid in terms of normal Filipino weather. As the wind began to pick up, the corrugated steel roofing over our pump outside began to be agitated and make a lot of noise. A door to a bathroom outside began to swing and squeak with each gust. At about this time we decided to turn on the emergency lamp so that we would be able to have a lot of light as the storm got worse. It turned out to be a good idea because all the noise that the storm was making would have been a little more scary in complete darkness.

5:00am

The storm started to get bad. The pressure began to drop quite quickly. We could tell that the corrugated steel roofing over an annex to the apartment was sustaining heavy damage. Doors that weren’t locked began to swing and slam. By the end of this hour, the pressure had dropped so far, that it went off the scale on the barometer. We started to see a little bit of light coming from outside before sunrise. Because we knew that the center of the storm wasn’t supposed to arrive for more than an hour still, we were amazed that it was going to continue to get worse at an increasingly rapid rate for such a period of time.

6:00am

The storm became very severe, and the pressure continued to decrease very rapidly. The wind blew open two locked doors into other rooms in the apartment and the wind started to blow everything around in those rooms. Many of the things that we had left in other rooms were blown onto the floor. The wind progressed from frequent gusts to a sustained roar, and we could hear that other parts of our apartment were being heavily damaged.  We heard a window break. The sun rose during this hour, and when we peeked out between the walls of our mattress fort, we could see the branches of one of our neighbors cocoa trees plastered against one of the windows of our bedroom that was facing the oncoming winds. Water began to collect beneath the windows since it was raining sideways. When it got to its worst, we stopped looking out between the mattresses and tightened the cords holding the mattresses a little more since we thought the windows might not hold up too much longer.

Approx. 7:15am

The storm stopped suddenly. Our barometer had made nearly a complete circle and would have read about 890hPa (88% normal air pressure) if it had markings that low.

Barometer readings go off the charts

There was still quite a breeze, and at first we weren’t completely sure if it was the eye of the typhoon. Once we figured out that it was definitely the eye of the storm, we got out of our fort. We heard people shouting outside, and when we opened one of the windows, we saw how bad it had really been.

All of the houses that were not made of cement and rebar had either collapsed or been blown away. We went out one of the doors that had been blown open and took pictures of the outside. In the kitchen, we saw that a large part of the roof was gone and the sky could be seen through a section of the ceiling that was missing.

Anticipating the second half of the storm, we retreated again to the inside of our fort. As we were climbing inside, we heard people screaming. At first, we thought that they were screaming because they were trying to find people in the rubble or perhaps because they had actually found people in the rubble, but we were about to find out why they were screaming. After we had been inside the fort for about a minute, I noticed the sound of running water. Peeking out between the mattresses, I saw black, muddy water flowing into the room from the door seams. I hadn’t remembered exactly how storm surge worked, and I had thought it was pushed, not pulled by large tropical cyclones. Even by my most liberal estimation, however, I had not at any point anticipated that the ocean level could rise enough to cause severe flooding three football fields away from the seashore.