ANGELENOS: “Triumph over tragedy”

ANGELES CITY – The Angelenos remembers the triumph over the tragedy that hit the city twenty years ago wrought by the eruption of the once slumbered volcano.

According to Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo on June 15, 1991 almost destroyed everything in Angeles City.

“While we recall the anguish, despair and hopelessness, we will also celebrate the triumph, the success, the resurrection and the rising from the ashes of the Angelenos,” Pamintuan said.

With the constant threat of lahar flows burying the city and erasing it from the maps, aggravated by the departure of the American forces in Clark Air Base, Angeles was considered a doomed city.

“Our young people today, and first time visitors of Angeles, would never imagine the travails and tragedies that the people of Angeles faced during that time,” the mayor said.

He recalled that the Angelenos had very little idea about lahar.

“I remember I made a call, as acting mayor then, for us to fortify the banks of the Abacan River, the possible path of the lahar. I thought that if the lahar breached the banks of the river, it will spill over to the nearby communities and ruin our city all the more. I even asked for volunteers,” Pamintuan said.

He said that the most spectacular sight and memory of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption was not the giant mushroom of ash that rose kilometers into the atmosphere but rather the more than 20,000 Angelenos who were in several parallel lines at both banks of the Abacan, some with picks and shovels, and the rest passing on sandbags which were piled at the river walls to reinforce them from the flow of lahar.

“The spirit of the Angeleños never faltered. Through their resiliency, strength of character, trust in their leaders and faith in God, they survived, stood up and moved forward. They have turned tragedy into triumph,” the mayor concluded.