Along with 45 others, the co-founder of Maison Bukana thought they were at a 'safer' place. But they were wrong
Living in Siargao for the past eight years, the French-Filipino businessman and surfer Christophe Bariou, or Chris to many, has put his heart and soul into building his life project: the exclusive fully serviced villa, Maison Bukana, in Barangay Malinao. True to its name, the luxurious four-bedroom haven lies just where the scenic river and the majestic ocean meet, on a property acquired by the Bariou family in the Eighties when there was practically nothing built on the island save for a few houses. At that time, surfing was not as popular yet. “Surfing in Siargao started in the Nineties when the famous surf photographer John Callahan came and published about it in a magazine,” Bariou explains. This private villa would later on become one of the surviving structures post-Typhoon Odette.
The caretaker, who had been working for the Bariou family for decades, attested that they had never experienced a storm as strong as Odette. Not even the 1984 typhoon Nitang (Ike), the second deadliest tropical cyclone in 20th century Philippines, which also wreaked havoc in Siargao and the rest of Surigao del Norte.
“We were bracing for hours. It felt like weeks,” Bariou recounts his experience while his family and his staff were in a supposedly ‘safer’ place. They had enough time to prepare. The night before the storm, he could already hear the whistling wind. Unable to sleep that night, he checked the forecast again by the broadcast meteorologist Robert Speta at 4:00am. He got more anxious when he read reports about the typhoon. Perturbed, he woke up everyone, telling them they needed to evacuate up in the hills. At first he was only concerned about a possible storm surge. “My friend’s house is a big concrete cube on top of a hill. We thought it’s going to be safe there,” Bariou says. But he was wrong.
Read also: Lend a Helping Hand to Victims of Odette PH: Here's a Rundown of Donation Drives
The spirit is still there. The waves are still there. Surfing is still there. It’s not the end of Siargao
When they arrived at his friend’s home, the wind was starting to gust. “The first thing we realised was that we were 45 [people] in the house. There were ten kids aged 2-7 years old. That was the scary part,” he says, recalling how the children were having fun not knowing there was a big disaster about to unfold. “That got my eyes to tears. They were the most important that we have to protect.”
The roof of the home was not 100 per cent concrete with some parts made of metal and plastic sheets. The windows were not made of tempered glass either. “We knew that once [the glass] broke, it would be broken glass everywhere,” he continues. The adults then helped each other to secure the home the best they could, finding all the materials they could use to improvise. The children, on the other hand, were secured in a makeshift bunker under the concrete stairs, which his sister and the others prepared. “It was as if we were engaged in war against the typhoon. But everything we did to bar windows and doors was useless,” Bariou shares, watching the roof totally blown away. The place was no longer as safe as he thought. “Once the wind was in, everything was hell and shards of broken glass were everywhere,” Bariou remembers the winds, coming from all directions, shattering everything around them. It left him speechless. “I found a girl stuck in the middle of the living room. I thought she was going to die. She was so scared that she couldn’t move anymore and was getting hit by everything. So I got her, we ran and she fell. We held a piece of plywood as a shield for four hours in one corner of the house, bracing for the impact of the constant glass tornadoes brought about by the 260 km/h gusts.”
When the storm stopped, Bariou and the group checked on each other. “We really thought that at least half of us in that home would be dead,” he says, thankful that he was wrong. Only a mountain of debris greeted them outside; they had no casualties.
Read also: What are the 2 Most Scenic Tourist Spots in the Philippines?
