Philippines Reeling in Aftermath of Typhoon
Published: November 10, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
Aid efforts in the Philippines were complicated by the magnitude of the devastation, as communications systems were shut down by the storm. In addition, the Philippine National Red Cross said its relief efforts were being hampered by looters, including some who attacked trucks of food and other supplies that were being sent from the southern port city of Davao to Tacloban on Sunday, The Associated Press reported.
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International aid agencies and foreign governments are also sending emergency teams. At the request of the Philippine government, the United States defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, ordered the deployment of ships and aircraft to bring in emergency supplies and help in the search-and-rescue operations, the Defense Department said. The United States Embassy in Manila made $100,000 immediately available for health and sanitation efforts, its Twitter feed said. A United Nations disaster assessment team was already on the ground.
“The last time I saw something on this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, the head of the United Nations team, said in a statement, referring to the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and 13 other countries. “This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed.”
Mar Roxas, the Philippine interior minister, said that while relief supplies for Tacloban had already begun arriving, they could not leave the airport 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.”
Photos and television footage from the affected areas showed fierce winds ripping tin roofs off homes and sending waves crashing into wooden buildings that splintered under the force. Large ships were tossed onshore, and vehicles were shown piled atop one another. Video footage from Tacloban showed ocean water rushing through the streets of the city, which is about 360 miles southeast of Manila and is the capital of the province of Leyte.
Robert S. Ziegler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, said that he was very concerned that the damage reports seemed to be mainly from Tacloban 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 of the sort that hit Tacloban, he said. “The disturbing reports are the lack of reports, and the areas that are cut off could be quite severely hit.”
The research institute, which is one of the world’s most famous agricultural research institutes, is near Manila, and far enough north that “all we experienced was some rain and some wind,” Mr. Ziegler said by telephone.
Video from Tacloban on ABS-CBN television showed widespread looting in the city, with scores of people descending on stores and stuffing suitcases and bags with clothing and housewares.
Residents of Cebu, one of the country’s largest cities, said that many roads to the north of Cebu Island were still closed after towns there suffered very heavy damage as the typhoon slammed its way through. The roar of the wind during the typhoon was punctuated by the shattering of windows, residents said, although the city of Cebu itself 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 City.
In Mabolo, another town on the city’s northern outskirts, the winds toppled a locally famous tree with a trunk roughly a yard in diameter that had withstood every typhoon for more than a century. The tree damaged a wall of St. Joseph’s Church, but no one was injured, residents said.
The extent of the damage across the country and the rising death toll threatened to make the typhoon the worst storm in Philippine history. According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, the deadliest storm to hit the Philippines until now was Tropical Storm Thelma, which flooded the town of Ormoc, on Leyte Island, on Nov. 5, 1991, and killed more than 5,000 people.
On Samar Island, near Tacloban, Leo N. Dacaynos of the local disaster office said the local death toll from the typhoon was at least 300 people, and he said 2,000 others were missing, The Associated Press reported.
The Social Welfare and Development Office said the storm affected 4.28 million people in about 270 towns and cities spread across 36 provinces in the central Philippines.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 10, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the date that Tropical Storm Thelma hit the Philippines. It was on Nov. 5, 1991, not Nov. 15.
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