Armed with her camera, she captured the heartbreaking aftermath of Typhoon Odette on Siargao
“It didn’t even look real at first, as if we were in an apocalyptic movie. My house was completely destroyed. The house next to mine got smashed by a coconut tree. I lost all my personal belongings,” shares the French photographer and videographer Camille du Pont who was only able to take her cameras and computer with her during the typhoon. Like the rest, she had lost not only her home but all the good memories of the idyllic island to the storm. “The scene was unreal, everything around us was flooded and destroyed with nonstop wind,” she continues.
Thinking that it was only a usual typhoon and that it would hit the northern part of Siargao, she and her boyfriend evacuated on the day the storm was forecasted to make a landfall on the island, a bit later than the rest who moved to the highlands and the evacuation sites earlier. Before they knew it, the storm had quickly escalated to Category 5 and its trajectory changed, now approaching the heart of the island where they are at. “We left just before the typhoon [hit], but it was already super scary to drive. The rain was very strong, and coconut trees started falling down,” du Pont relates. Her home is made of light materials and was too risky a place to stay with the winds whirling nonstop. On survival mode, her boyfriend insisted they move to his concrete house. “As we arrived in my boyfriend’s house, a coconut tree fell down one metre [in front] of us. And it was only the beginning … We spent the whole time hiding in a corner of the house flooded by the rain and the roof drifted away,” she says, recounting how frightened they were amidst the calamity.
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What hit her hard was seeing with her own eyes the severity of the damage caused by Super Typhoon Odette the following day. “We went to see Cloud 9 and my heart totally broke when I saw that the tower was gone,” du Pont says, talking about the most iconic landmark in the town of General Luna. For a surfer like du Pont who has seen how Siargao blossomed from an unassuming paradise to a world-class destination, seeing the collapse of this tower is truly devastating. After all, the Cloud 9 boardwalk symbolise how the island has risen from the doldrums through the years.
While du Pont has only been living in the island for half a decade, she feels a deep connection with the place and the locals, especially with the way they share their love for the ocean and the simple life. Coming from a four-year stint in fast-paced China after earning a Master's degree in graphic design, moving to a paradisiacal place like Siargao is quite an easy decision to make. “I got really sick of the city life. I chose the island because I wanted to learn how to surf and take underwater photos. I settled in Siargao in 2016,” the photographer who has been documenting the island and other nature-oriented activities like beach clean-ups as part of her contribution to the non-governmental organisation, SeaMovement, explains.
