Scheduled preview · publishes Oct 28, 2026, 06:00 AM PHT
Odette struck Siargao, Surigao, Bohol, Cebu, Negros and Palawan in one track. Its lesson is about the calendar and about recovery time.
On 16 December 2021, Typhoon Odette (international name Rai) made landfall in Siargao as a very strong typhoon and then crossed the Visayas, hitting Surigao, Dinagat, Bohol, southern Cebu, Negros, and parts of Palawan before exiting.
More than four hundred people died. Power and water were out for weeks in many areas and longer in some. It was, by most measures, the most damaging Philippine typhoon in years.
December. Well past the month most people think of as peak season, and in a part of the country that many buyers assume is comparatively sheltered.
There is no month in which the whole archipelago is quiet. Peak landfall activity is in the second half of the year, but late-season storms are ordinary, not exotic, and the eastern Visayas and Mindanao are exposed during exactly the stretch when western Luzon is drying out. See October is the peak month and the shear line.
If you view a property in the Visayas in April and never in December, you have seen half of it.
The damage figures get the headlines. The number that changes how you should think about a property is how long normal life took to resume.
In parts of Siargao, Dinagat, and Surigao, mains power took months. Water systems, which depend on pumps, went with it. Mobile networks were down for weeks in places. Supply chains for basic goods and for construction materials were severely disrupted.
That is not a hazard rating. It is what living there under stress actually looks like, and it belongs in your assessment as much as any map layer.
Ask people who were there:
Odette, like Rolly the year before, removed a very large number of roofs. Roof loss is what turns a survivable storm into a total loss of contents, because everything inside is then exposed to days of rain.
Roof structure and fixing is a structural engineering question, not a hazard-map question. For any property on an exposed coast, it is the assessment worth paying for. See roof design for typhoon wind.
Regional detail is in buying in Siargao, Surigao del Norte, Bohol, Cebu, and Palawan.
A hazard screening reports mapped susceptibility, elevation, slope, and distances at your point from public national datasets. It does not rate wind, predict recovery time, or assess a rebuilt structure. PAGASA covers the weather, the LGU covers local recovery, and a licensed structural engineer covers the building.
CheckHazard does not replace a professional geotechnical or engineering survey.