We’re victims of Iloilo City fire four times

By Alex P. Vidal

“Never start a fire, especially if there is no water nearby.”―Matshona Dhliwayo

THE grim death of 26-year-old call center agent Lyn Rose Sobretodo of Pototan, Iloilo and 21-year-old engineering student Renz Aguilar of Concepcion, Iloilo in a fire that gutted several boarding houses in Brgy. San Nicolas. La Paz, Iloilo City on February 18 has startled me.

The fire in that residential area killed two adult persons even if it happened late in the afternoon. It’s hard to imagine the number of casualties if it occurred in the middle of the night.

I get nervous each time there is news about fire in Iloilo City, the place where I was born and raised, now that I live in a faraway place.

Call it phobia borne out of traumatic experiences that refuse to escape my memory since childhood.

Mirriam-Webster defines phobia as “an exaggerated and often disabling fear usually inexplicable to the subject and having sometimes a logical but usually an illogical or symbolic object, class of objects, or situation compare compulsion, obsession.”

Harvard Health Publishing calls phobia as “a persistent, excessive, unrealistic fear of an object, person, animal, activity or situation. It is a type of anxiety disorder. A person with a phobia either tries to avoid the thing that triggers the fear or endures it with great anxiety and distress.”

Our house—or houses (we used to have two)—in Iloilo City were burnt not only once and twice, but four times.

To be a fire victim once is nauseating; twice is catastrophic; third time is horrendous; four times is total shock and darkness.

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Unlike in the 1976 fire where only our bahay kubo (our house was built using local materials such as wood, bamboo and nipa grass) went up in flames together with other houses in the neighborhood also made of light materials, our two houses were among those gutted in 1991 in the second biggest fire in Iloilo City’s history that burnt a total of seven barangays—Rizal Pala Pala Zone I; Rizal Pala Pala Zone II; Rizal Estanzuela, Babay Tanza, Rizal Esperanza, Bonifacio Tanza, Timawa Tanza.

This seaside belt area in the City Proper had been transformed into heaps of ruins and grisly images of charred pieces of steels, bricks, scorched woods and cement floors.

All our memories—from photo albums, birth certificates, medals, trophies, my very precious first place finish certificate in a walkathon race, cloths and other personal belongings, jewelry, a typewriter, shoes, books and sports magazines, frames, etcetera—turned into ashes.

It’s difficult to “start all over again” in the adult years when all the memories and physical remnants of your childhood life were totally gone forever.

Fires don’t pick areas where to unleash a mayhem. They don’t select which item to torch and which to spare. Everything will go up in flame. Everything will turn into ashes.

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Two years later, a fire broke out anew in the back of our neighborhood but burnt only partially our kitchen and the walls in the two rooms.

Constantly badgered by firetruck sirens indicating there’s a fire call and alarm every now and then, we’d stopped unpacking our stuff from the sacks and other ready-to-carry containers.

We’d always anticipated evacuation, the habit we’d grown accustomed to because of the incessant threat of fire anytime of the day, thus visitors would sometimes mistake our living area for a rice and copra bodega if not evacuation center.

The fourth fire that happened in 2015 was the most painful because it happened several months only after I immigrated to the United States.

We lost not only most of our memories and very important stuff (including the entire 2000-2004 files of our publication, Iloilo Today, the New Millennium Publication) but all the letters, cards, plaques, albums, school yearbooks, certificates, frames, all my childhood items, and many more.

We’ve been robbed and burglarized before; we’ve been peppered and pounded by super typhoons, but none of the agony and sufferings we experienced from these gloomy experiences could match the sadness and tribulations that gobbled up our hearts in the 2015 fire.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)