A resident looks at houses
damaged by typhoon Haiyan, in Tacloban city, Leyte province central
Philippines on Sunday, Nov. 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)
TACLOBAN, Philippines (AP) - As many as 10,000 people are believed dead
in one Philippine city alone after one of the worst storms ever recorded
unleashed ferocious winds and giant waves that washed away homes and
schools. Corpses hung from tree branches and were scattered along
sidewalks and among flattened buildings, while looters raided grocery
stores and gas stations in search of food, fuel and water.
Officials projected the death toll could climb even higher when
emergency crews reach areas cut off by flooding and landslides. Even in
the disaster-prone Philippines, which regularly contends with
earthquakes, volcanoes and tropical cyclones, Typhoon Haiyan appears to
be the deadliest natural disaster on record.
Haiyan hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippine archipelago on Friday
and quickly barreled across its central islands before exiting into the
South China Sea, packing winds of 147 miles per hour that gusted to 170
mph, and a storm surge that caused sea waters to rise 20 feet.
It wasn't until Sunday that the scale of the devastation became clear,
with local officials on hardest-hit Leyte Island saying that there may
be 10,000 dead in the provincial capital of Tacloban alone. Reports also
trickled in from elsewhere on the island, and from neighboring islands,
indicating hundreds, if not thousands more deaths, though it will be
days before the full extent of the storm's impact can be assessed.
Photos: Typhoon Haiyan Slams into Philippines
"On
the way to the airport we saw many bodies along the street," said
Philippine-born Australian Mila Ward, 53, who was waiting at the
Tacloban airport to catch a military flight back to Manila. "They were
covered with just anything - tarpaulin, roofing sheets, cardboards." She
said she passed "well over 100" dead bodies along the way.
In the storm's aftermath, people wept while retrieving the bodies of
loved ones from inside buildings. On a street littered with fallen
trees, roofing material and other wreckage, all that was left of one
large building were the skeletal remains of its rafters.
The airport in Tacloban, about 360 miles southeast of Manila, was a
muddy wasteland of debris, with crumpled tin roofs and overturned cars.
The airport tower's glass windows were shattered, and air force
helicopters were flying in and out as relief operations got underway.
Residential homes lining the road into Tacloban city were all blown or
washed away.
"All systems, all vestiges of modern living - communications, power,
water - all are down," Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said after visiting
Tacloban on Saturday. "There is no way to communicate with the people."
Haiyan raced across the eastern and central Philippines, inflicting
serious damage to at least six of the archipelago's more than 7,000
islands, with Leyte, neighboring Samar Island, and the northern part of
Cebu appearing to take the hardest hit. It weakened as it crossed the
South China Sea before approaching northern Vietnam. It was forecast to
hit land Monday morning.
On Leyte, regional police chief Elmer Soria said the provincial governor
had told him there were about 10,000 deaths there, primarily from
drowning and collapsed buildings. Most of the deaths were in Tacloban, a
city of about 200,000 that is the biggest on Leyte Island. A mass
burial was planned for Sunday in a nearby town.
On Samar, Leo Dacaynos of the provincial disaster office said 300 people
were confirmed dead in one town and another 2,000 were missing, while
some towns have yet to be reached by rescuers. He pleaded for food and
water and said power was out and there was no cellphone signal, making
communication possible only by radio.
Reports from the other affected islands indicated dozens, perhaps hundreds more deaths.
The massive casualties occurred even though the government had evacuated
nearly 800,000 people ahead of the typhoon. About 4 million people were
affected by the storm, the national disaster agency said.
President Benigno Aquino III flew around Leyte by helicopter on Sunday
and landed in Tacloban to get a firsthand look at the disaster. He said
the government's priority was to restore power and communications in
isolated areas and deliver relief and medical assistance to victims.
Challenged to respond to a disaster of such magnitude, the Philippine
government also accepted help from its U.S. and European allies.
In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed the military's
Pacific Command to deploy ships and aircraft to support
search-and-rescue operations and airlift emergency supplies, while
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso sent Aquino a message
saying "we stand ready to contribute with urgent relief and assistance
if so required in this hour of need."
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon offered his condolences and
said U.N. humanitarian agencies were working closely with the
Philippine government to respond quickly with emergency assistance,
according to a statement.
The Philippines is annually buffeted by tropical storms and typhoons,
which are called hurricanes and cyclones elsewhere on the planet. The
nation is positioned alongside the warm South Pacific where typhoons are
spawned. Many rake the islands with fierce winds and powerful waves
each year, and the archipelago's exposed eastern seaboard often bears
the brunt.
Even by the standards of the Philippines, however, Haiyan is a
catastrophe of epic proportions and has shocked the impoverished and
densely populated nation of 96 million people. Its winds were among the
strongest ever recorded, and it appears to have killed many more people
than the previous deadliest Philippine storm, Thelma, which killed
around 5,100 people in the central Philippines in 1991.The deadliest
disaster on record was the 1976 magnitude-7.9 earthquake that triggered a
tsunami in the Moro Gulf in the southern Philippines, killing 5,791.
Haiyan's winds were so strong that Tacloban residents who sought shelter
at a local school tied down the building's roof, but it was ripped off
anyway and the school collapsed, City Administrator Tecson Lim said. It
wasn't clear how many died there.
The city's two largest malls and groceries were looted and the gasoline
stations destroyed by the typhoon. Police were deployed to guard a fuel
depot to prevent the theft of fuel. Two hundred additional police
officers came to Tacloban on Sunday from elsewhere in the country to
help restore law and order.
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said Aquino was "speechless" when he
told him of the devastation the typhoon had wrought in Tacloban.
"I told him all systems are down," Gazmin said. "There is no power, no water, nothing. People are desperate. They're looting."
Tacloban, in the east-central Philippines, is near the Red Beach on
Leyte Island where U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur waded ashore in 1944
during the Second World War and fulfilled his famous pledge: "I shall
return."
It was the first city liberated from the Japanese by U.S. and Filipino
forces and served as the Philippines' temporary capital for several
months. It is also the hometown of former Filipino first lady Imelda
Marcos, whose nephew, Alfred Romualdez, is the city's mayor.
One Tacloban resident said he and others took refuge inside a parked
Jeep to protect themselves from the storm, but the vehicle was swept
away by a surging wall of water.
"The water was as high as a coconut tree," said 44-year-old Sandy
Torotoro, a bicycle taxi driver who lives near the airport with his wife
and 8-year-old daughter. "I got out of the Jeep and I was swept away by
the rampaging water with logs, trees and our house, which was ripped
off from its mooring.
"When we were being swept by the water, many people were floating and
raising their hands and yelling for help. But what can we do? We also
needed to be helped," Torotoro said.
In Torotoro's village, bodies could be seen lying along the muddy main
road, as residents who had lost their homes huddled with the few
possessions they had managed to save. The road was lined with trees that
had fallen to the ground.
Vice Mayor Jim Pe of Coron town on Busuanga, the last island battered by
the typhoon before it blew away to the South China Sea, said most of
the houses and buildings there had been destroyed or damaged. Five
people drowned in the storm surge and three others were missing, he said
by phone.
The sound of the wind "was like a 747 flying just above my roof," he
said. His family and some of his neighbors whose houses were destroyed
took shelter in his basement.
Tim Ticar, a local tourism officer, said 6,000 foreign and local
tourists were stranded on the popular resort island of Boracay, one of
the tourist spots in the typhoon's path.
UNICEF estimated that about 1.7 million children are living in areas
impacted by the typhoon, according to the agency's representative in the
Philippines Tomoo Hozumi. UNICEF's supply division in Copenhagen was
loading 60 metric tons of relief supplies for an emergency airlift
expected to arrive in the Philippines on Tuesday.
"The devastation is ... I don't have the words for it," Interior
Secretary Roxas said. "It's really horrific. It's a great human
tragedy."
PHOTOS ON SKYE: Typhoon Haiyan Slams Into Philippines
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