November 11, 2013
The scale of the devastation and the desperation wrought by one of the most powerful storms ever to buffet the Philippines came into much clearer view on Monday, three days after it hopscotched across the country’s midsection whipping up monstrous walls of seawater.
Survivors spoke of people being swept away in tsunami-like torrents, their corpses strewn among the wreckage of the storm, Typhoon Haiyan. Photos from the hard-hit city of Tacloban showed vast stretches swept clean of homes, and reports emerged of people who were desperate for food and water raiding aid convoys and stripping the stores that had been left standing.
Residents of Tacloban described a terrifying experience on Friday evening in which seawater suddenly filled the streets, rising within minutes until it had submerged the ground floors of homes and was waist-deep on the second floors of those that had second floors. Screaming people bobbed in the water — many grabbing for floating debris, but not all succeeding.
“Swirling water from the ocean filled the streets,” said Virginia Basinang, 54, a retired teacher in Tacloban. “Some of them were able to hold on, some were lucky and lived, but most did not.” When the water receded, 14 bodies lay on the broken wall of the house across the street from her home, Ms. Basinang said. They were still there on Monday, she said.
As Monday dawned, it became increasingly obvious that Typhoon Haiyan’s destructive force had been exponentially worse than first assumed, ravaging cities, towns and fishing villages across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday.
By some estimates, at least 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban alone, and with phone service out across stretches of the far-flung archipelago, it was difficult to know if the storm was as deadly in more remote areas.
The storm barreled across palm-fringed beaches and plowed into frail homes with a force that by some estimates approached that of a tornado.
The main effect, however, increasingly appeared to be a storm surge that was driven by the winds, believed to be among the strongest ever recorded in the Philippines, lifting walls of water onto the land as they struck. By some accounts, the winds reached 190 miles an hour.
“We are seeing a lot of dead throughout the province,” said Brig. Gen. Domingo Tutaan Jr., a spokesman for the Philippine armed forces. “I have been in the service for 32 years, and I have been involved with a lot of calamities. I don’t have words to describe what our ground commanders are seeing in the field.”
People stood among the ruins of houses destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban, Philippines, a city of about 220,000. Photo: Erik De Castro/Reuters
United Nations officials said Monday that Valerie Amos, the organization’s top relief official, was en route to the Philippines to lead the international aid effort, which had already begun mobilizing on the ground. Ms. Amos, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, released $25 million from an emergency response fund to help pay for immediate priorities and planned to launch a “flash appeal” for more money when she arrived on Tuesday.
“We are focused first and foremost on the requirements for food, shelter, medical support, to prevent the outbreak of public health disasters,” John Ging, the operations coordinator for United Nations relief, told reporters in New York.
Asked if he thought the death toll could rise, Mr. Ging said, “We hope it doesn’t get any higher but we have to be prepared for the worst.”
As aid crews struggled to reach ravaged areas, the storm exposed some of the perennial problems of the Philippines. The country’s roads and airports, long starved of money by corrupt and incompetent governments, are some of the worst in Southeast Asia and often make traveling long distances a trial. On Monday, clogged with debris from splintered buildings and shattered trees, the roads in the storm’s path were slowing rescue teams.
Richard Gordon, the chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, said that a Red Cross aid convoy to Tacloban had to turn back on Sunday after it stopped at a collapsed bridge and was nearly hijacked by a crowd of hungry people. “There is very little food going in, and what food there was, was captured” by the crowd, Mr. Gordon said Monday morning in a telephone interview.
The storm posed new challenges for President Benigno S. Aquino III, who just two months ago struggled to wrest control of a major city in the south from insurgents. Mr. Aquino has been praised at home and abroad for his fight against corruption during his three and a half years in office, leading to increased foreign investment and an impressive growth rate. But he must still contend with Muslim separatists in the south and with provinces that have long been the domains of regional strongmen, resistant to government control.
Now added to that list was one of the country’s worst natural disasters, at a time when emergency funds have been depleted by other calamities, most notably a magnitude-7.2 earthquake that struck the middle of the country four weeks ago. On Monday, amid rising fears of a breakdown of law and order after reports of widespread looting and robberies, the government said it was flying more police officers to the region.
Although deadly storms are not unusual in the Philippines, Typhoon Haiyan appears to stand apart, both in the ferocity of its winds, which some described as sounding like a freight train, and in its type of destruction.
Most deaths from typhoons in the Philippines are caused by mudslides and rain-swollen rivers. So when Haiyan sped across the islands on Friday, some officials and weather experts in the Philippines thought they had witnessed something of a miracle. The storm that lit up social media for days with dire warnings was thought to have mostly spared the islands because it did not linger long enough to dump a deluge of rain.
What they did not account for was a storm surge that some reports said reached 13 feet in Tacloban, leaving a trail of destruction that in some ways mirrored a tsunami. One photo of a merchant ship left stranded on land resembled images from Japan in 2011, when an earthquake flung a wall of water onto that nation’s northeastern shore.
Prof. Rick Murray, an oceanographer with expertise in Asian climate systems at Boston University’s department of earth and environment, said in an email that several factors contributed to Haiyan’s destructiveness, starting with its intensity. “Just by looking at the satellite images, the eye is perfectly formed,” he said. “The storm is tight, nearly perfectly circular, with incredibly high wind speeds. It is right out of the textbooks.”
The low atmospheric pressure of the storm’s eye helped pull the storm surge, in which water can rise by dozens of feet very rapidly, Professor Murray said. “This is, of course, on top of the wind, on top of the waves, on top of the normal tidal cycle,” he said. “You have swollen rivers from the intense rain, falling at inches per hour. The bottom line is that there is a heck of a lot of water arriving from all directions.”
While it was unclear whether the power of the storm was tied to climate change, the surge may serve as another reminder to low-lying cities of the need to prepare for the worst.
Mr. Aquino had urged residents to leave low-lying areas, but he did not order an evacuation. On Sunday, he toured some stricken areas and declared a “state of calamity,” a first step in the release of emergency money from the government.
Survivors stayed in their damaged house after the typhoon. Photo: Romeo Ranoco/Reuters
As Mr. Aquino arrived in Tacloban to meet with victims of the storm and to coordinate rescue and cleanup efforts, his defense secretary, Voltaire Gazmin, described the chaos in the city of 220,000. “There is no power, no water, nothing,” Mr. Gazmin said. “People are desperate.”
Richard Heydarian, a foreign policy adviser to the Philippine Congress, said, “The challenge now is mobilization and reconstruction and rehabilitation of the affected areas, and I think the president is determined to showcase his leadership now and underscore the importance of the national government.”
Lynette Lim, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, weathered the storm in a local government office in Tacloban before leaving the city on a military aircraft Sunday morning. She said that even schools, gymnasiums and other sites the local government had designated as evacuation centers had failed to hold up.
“The roofs had been ripped off, the windows had shattered and sometimes the ceilings had caved in,” Ms. Lim said in a telephone interview from Manila.
Poor neighborhoods fared especially badly, with virtually no structures left standing other than a few government buildings. With no police officers in sight on Sunday morning, Ms. Lim said, people had begun grabbing food and other items off pharmacy and grocery shelves.
Video from Tacloban on ABS-CBN television showed scores of people entering stores and stuffing suitcases and bags with clothing and housewares. One photo showed a man with a gun guarding his store.
News reports from Tacloban told of how officials were unable to get an accurate death count because law enforcement and government personnel could not be found after the storm. Tacloban’s mayor, Alfred S. Romualdez, was reported to have been “holding on to his roof” before being rescued, according to The Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The storm also appeared to have obliterated most structures in northern Panay Island, about 300 miles west. While the number of deaths was unclear, fishing boats in Estancia, a busy Panay port, were returning Monday morning with hauls of corpses that had been swept out to sea.
“We retrieved 11 more bodies from the ocean today, and they are still washing ashore,” said Eugene Tentativo, Estancia’s disaster risk reduction officer. “The morgues are full.”
The weakened typhoon made landfall early Monday in Vietnam; hundreds of thousands of people there had been evacuated as the storm approached, but there were no reports of significant damage or injuries, according to The Associated Press. Haiyan was downgraded to a tropical storm as it entered southern China, The A.P. said.
International aid agencies and foreign governments sent emergency teams to the Philippines. At the request of the Philippine government, the United States defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, ordered the deployment of ships and aircraft to deliver supplies and help in the search-and-rescue efforts, the Defense Department said. The United States Embassy in Manila made $100,000 immediately available for health and sanitation efforts, according to its Twitter feed.
President Obama issued a statement on Sunday that said he expected “the incredible resiliency of the Philippine people” to help the country, an American ally, through the trauma. He said the United States also stood ready to assist the government’s relief and recovery efforts.
On Sunday, about 90 American Marines and sailors based in Okinawa, Japan, landed in the Philippines as part of an advance team assessing the disaster to determine what the Pentagon might need to help in relief efforts.
According to Col. Brad Bartlet, a Marine spokesman, the team has made requests for C-130 cargo airplanes, MV-22 Osprey helicopters and other aircraft to participate in search and recovery at sea. The Navy has also sent two P-3 Orion surveillance planes, which are often used during natural disasters to patrol the seas in search of survivors stranded in ships and boats.
Mar Roxas, the Philippine interior minister, said that while relief supplies were beginning to reach the Tacloban airport, they could go no farther because debris was blocking the roads in the area.
“The entire airport was under water up to roof level,” Mr. Roxas said, according to The Philippine Daily Inquirer. Speaking to reporters in Tacloban, he added, “The devastation here is absolute.”
Robert S. Zeigler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, said he was concerned that the damage reports seemed to be mainly from Tacloban, where aid has been concentrated so far, and not from the many fishing communities that line the coast.
“The coastal areas can be quite vulnerable — in many cases, you have fishing communities right up to the shoreline, and they can be wiped out” by a powerful storm surge, he said. “The disturbing reports are the lack of reports, and the areas that are cut off could be quite severely hit.”
On Panay Island, Mary Ann Baitan, 42, said she cowered with her two daughters, 6 and 10, under a bamboo table for more than two hours, singing to them as winds ripped away the roof of their home in Banat, another hard-hit town. “All we could do was hide and pray,” she said.
Across Cebu Province, 43 people were killed, 111 were injured and five were missing, said Wilson Ramos, the deputy disaster management officer for Cebu. The authorities were trying to conduct aerial surveys of the area directly in the storm’s center, particularly the town of Daanbantayan and Bantayan Island, Mr. Ramos said.
“We are very tired already,” he said in the province’s disaster offices. “But we hope to send relief to those affected.”
Residents of Cebu, one of the country’s largest cities, said many roads to the north of Cebu Island were still closed after towns there suffered heavy damage, although the city was spared the brunt of the storm.
“It was very loud, like a train,” said Ranulfo L. Manatad, a night watchman at a street market in Mandaue City, on the northern outskirts of Cebu.
In Mabolo, another town on the northern flank of Cebu, the winds toppled a locally famous tree with a trunk roughly a yard in diameter. The tree had withstood every typhoon for more than a century.
See more pictures here.
Source: The New York Times
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