Typhoon survivors wait for aid

PENABLANCA: Hungry Philippine typhoon survivors huddled in makeshift shelters and waited for aid yesterday after losing nearly everything from one of the most powerful storms to hit the Southeast Asian archipelago.

Super Typhoon Haima struck on Wednesday night with winds similar to those of catastrophic Haiyan in 2013, which was then the strongest storm to hit the disaster-prone country and claimed more than 7,350 lives.

Eight people were confirmed killed and tens of thousands lost their homes as Haima devastated farming and mountain communities across the north of the Philippines’ main island of Luzon.

“I cried when I saw my beans and squash plants that had been raked off by the winds. My mango trees were also toppled,” farmer Leonardo Longan, 66, said in the town of Penablanca, close to where Haima made landfall.

For Mr Longan, just like many of his neighbours, home is now an improvised shelter with palm leaves for a roof, blankets for walls and a bed made from the collapsed wooden wall of his old home.

He and his wife sent their four schoolage children to live with a relative and have borrowed rice from a local trader.

In Manila, a survey team was dispatched by plane yesterday to assess the damage in the Cagayan Valley region, large parts of which the authorities said was flooded by the overflowing Cagayan river.

Motorcycle-riding officials were also sent to remote areas, Romina Marasigan, spokeswoman for the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council told reporters.

But in Penablanca, a farming town of about 42,000 people, Mr Longan said aid had yet to arrive.

In San Pablo, another Cagayan Valley town about 20km south of Penablanca, four families spent Thursday night on a roadside after Haima flattened their homes.

“No one has helped us. It is just us and other families, helping each other on the side of the road,” Jovy Dalupan, a mother of two, said.

Ms Dalupan said that her daughters, aged eight months and four years, had started coughing after being drenched during the storm and that their clothes were still wet.

“But we have nothing to change into,” she said.

Ms Marasigan, the disaster agency official, said a military plane-load of food aid was flown to the region yesterday to augment supplies already there.

But Cagayan Valley, a mostly farming region, was not as badly affected as the Cordillera highlands, she said.