Collapse in the Philippines

Typhoon Haiyan: Victims Flee Tacloban

With nothing but the clothes on their backs, hundreds of typhoon victims are making a desperate bid to escape Tacloban.

Sky News,

15 October, 2013, 14:40 CET

The ferry terminal in Ormoc City is full of lost Filipinos. They have nowhere to go. No plan, no home, no job, nothing.

All they have left are the few belongings they carry: small damp rucksacks, plastic bags, umbrellas. Some have only what they are wearing.

And they are supposed to be the lucky ones - the survivors of this cruel swipe of nature.

Each of them has their own story. Here is just one.

Julio Gatela is 32. He had a computer shop in Tacloban until his city became the place most devastated by the typhoon.

We meet him in the vast queue for one of the ferries away from here.

The first thing we discover is that he has eaten just a few biscuits for five days.

There is food in this particular town, but he hasn't the money to buy any. He has just enough for the ferry and no more.

He shows us, pulling out an old damp sack from his bag. It is full of coins he managed to collect from the rubble of his home. The rest of his savings were notes - paper money which would never have survived so much water.

This is a not a well-off part of the Philippines. There are banks but not everyone has an account. Julio doesn't. He saved his earnings at home.

Our conversation is heartbreaking. Julio doesn't know what he'll do.

"I don't have nothing else to do. I just want some rest. It's tragic out there (in Tacloban) so I have to calm myself and try to forget everything terrible that happened to us."

He is visibly depressed. I think he's probably emotionally broken. His face twitches as he talks to us.

"We don't know where else to go. What happened and why to us is a mystery for us."

He recalls the moment the storm hit.

"It was really terrible. Thundering strong winds. I cannot describe how strong it is. Different from every typhoon I have ever seen before.

"My roof was trembling. I put my life jacket on and I just waited. No one really knew what was going to happen. We have never seen big waves like this."

Many are trying to get to the neighbouring island of Cebu

With any luck, and with the coins he has salvaged, he will be on a ferry soon.

It will take him to the neighbouring island of Cebu where he hopes he will find the power to get him back on track.

"I don't know." he says. "I will just start at the beginning again."

In disasters like this, it's natural to think about the children, the mothers, the elderly. The reality is that everyone is suffering.

In fact, the children are probably the most resilient. I can see a few running around now, playing in the stifling sun which breaks the torrential rain. They don't really understand the chaos around them.

As I watch the kids playing, Julio recalls the friends and family he has lost.

"My uncle and many friends. And everything is destroyed. Everything."

Philippines typhoon death toll doubles

The death toll from a powerful typhoon that swept the central Philippines nearly doubled overnight, reaching 4,000, as helicopters from a US aircraft carrier and other naval ships began flying food, water and medical teams to ravaged regions.

Stuff,

16 November, 2013

President Benigno Aquino, caught off guard by the scale of the disaster, has been criticised for the slow pace of aid distribution and unclear estimates of casualties, especially in Tacloban, capital of hardest-hit Leyte province.

A notice board in Tacloban City Hall estimated the deaths at 4,000 on Friday, up from 2,000 a day before, in that town alone. Hours later, Tacloban mayor Alfred Romualdez apologised and said the toll was for the whole central Philippines.

The toll, marked up on a whiteboard, is compiled by officials who started burying bodies in a mass grave on Thursday.

Romualdez said some people may have been swept out to sea and their bodies lost after a tsunami-like wall of seawater slammed into coastal areas. One neighbourhood with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 was now deserted, he said.

The City Hall toll was the first public acknowledgement that the number of fatalities would likely far exceed an estimate given this week by Aquino, who said the loss of life from Typhoon Haiyan would be closer to 2,000 or 2,500.

Official confirmed deaths nationwide rose by more than 1,000 overnight to 3,621 on Friday after the typhoon, one of the strongest ever recorded, roared across the central Philippines a week ago.

Adding to the confusion, the United Nations, citing government figures, put the latest overall death toll at 4,460, but a spokeswoman said it was now reviewing the figure.

On Tuesday, Aquino said estimates of 10,000 dead by local officials were overstated and caused by ‘‘emotional trauma’’. Elmer Soria, a regional police chief who made that estimate to media, was removed from his post on Thursday.

A police spokesman said Soria was due to be transferred to headquarters in Manila. But a senior police official told Reuters he believed Soria was re-assigned because of his unauthorised casualty estimate.

U.S. HELICOPTERS AID RELIEF EFFORT

Stunned survivors in Tacloban said the toll could be many thousands. ‘‘There are a lot of dead people on the street in our neighbourhood, by the trash,’’ said Aiza Umpacan, a 27-year-old resident of San Jose, one of the worst-hit neighbourhoods.

‘‘There are still a lot of streets that were not visited by the disaster relief operations. They are just going through the highways, not the inner streets,’’ he said. ‘‘The smell is getting worse and we actually have neighbours who have been brought to hospital because they are getting sick.’’

The preliminary number of missing as of Friday, according to the Red Cross, rose to 25,000 from 22,000 a day earlier. That could include people who have since been located, it said.

The nuclear-powered USS George Washington aircraft carrier and accompanying ships arrived off eastern Samar province on Thursday evening, carrying 5,000 crew and more than 80 aircraft.

U.S. sailors have brought food and water ashore in Tacloban and the eastern Samar province town of Guiuan whose airport was a U.S. naval air base in World War Two. The carrier is moored near where U.S. General Douglas MacArthur’s force landed on Oct. 20, 1944, in one of the biggest Allied victories.

A Norwegian merchant navy training vessel arrived at Tacloban on Friday with goods from the U.N. World Food Programme, including 40 tonnes of rice, medical equipment and 6,200 body bags.

Boxes of aid were being unloaded at Tacloban’s badly damaged airport, where more than a thousand people queued for hours hoping to evacuate. The tarmac was a hive of activity, with three large South Korean military transport planes joining two U.S. Osprey aircraft and U.S. Navy helicopters unloading and ferrying aid.

Hundreds of people, part of nearly a million who have been displaced by the storm, lined up for food and drink at an evacuee processing centre at Mactan Air Base in Cebu, the country’s second-biggest city.

Some 522 evacuees passed through the centre on Thursday, with hundreds more arriving on Friday, a government coordinator, Erlinda Parame, said.

In one room, children huddled on a mud-streaked floor watching cartoons on a small television.

Nearby, Gerardo Alvarez, 53, sat strapped to a metal wheelchair, straining against the bandages that restrained him.

‘‘The water is coming! I’m going to die!’’ he shouted.

The traumatised man had escaped the storm surge from a second-storey window of his Tacloban home while his sister and mother, who were praying downstairs, drowned.