Trying to help after Typhoon Haiyan
At hospital in hard-hit city, wounds are stitched without anesthesia
Too many patients, too little medicine; Matthew Fisher tracks Canada’s DART team,
TACLOBAN, Philippines A rundown, single-storey building with filthy floors at Tacloban’s ruined airport has become the area’s main medical centre for victims of last week’s powerful typhoon. It has little medicine, virtually no facilities and very few doctors.
What it is not short of are patients. Hundreds of injured people, pregnant women, children and the elderly have poured into the squat, white building behind the control tower since typhoon Haiyan ravaged the eastern Philippines on Friday, killing thousands. Doctors who have been dealing with cuts, fractures and pregnancy complications said Wednesday they soon expect to be treating more serious problems such as pneumonia, dehydration, diarrhea and infections.
The medical woes add to the daunting tasks for authorities, including dealing with looters and clearing the bottlenecks holding up thousands of tonnes of aid material.
“The priority has got to be, let’s get the food in, let’s get the water in. We got a lot more come in today, But even that won’t be enough, We really need to scale up operation in an ongoing basis,” UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told reporters after touring Tacloban, the capital of Leyte province. Her office has released $25 million in emergency relief funds, accounting for a chunk of the money pledged by countries around the world.
The World Food Program distributed rice and other items to nearly 50,000 people in the Tacloban area Wednesday, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
While the cogs of what promises to be a massive international aid effort are beginning to turn, they are not quick enough for the 600,000 people displaced, many of them homeless, hungry and thirsty.
With the Tacloban airport battered and roads made impassable by debris, very little aid has arrived in the city. Most of it is stuck in Manila and the nearby airport of Cebu, a 45-minute flight away.
Many among the desperate residents have resorted to raiding for food. Mobs overran a rice warehouse on Leyte, collapsing a wall that killed eight people. Thousands of sacks of the grain were carted off. Also Wednesday, security forces exchanged gunfire with an armed gang.
Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez urged residents to flee the city because local authorities were having trouble providing food and water and maintaining order, The New York Times reported. He said the city desperately needed trucks to distribute relief shipments accumulating at the airport as well as equipment to pull decaying corpses from the rubble.
Despite those incidents, police said the situation was improving.
“We have restored order,” said Carmelo Espina Valmoria, director of the Philippine National Police special action force. “There has been looting for the last three days, but the situation has stabilized.”
With the local police force unable to operate — most were victims — the government rushed thousands of soldiers and 600 policemen from other parts of the country. The security forces, including army engineers, are helping clear roads and remove the dead, many of them on roadsides. A 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew was in place.
“There’s a lot of dead bodies outside. There’s no water, no food,” said Dr. Victoriano Sambale, one of the dozen medical staff tending to thousands of people at the airport clinic. Until Wednesday, there was no anesthetic, so open wounds had to be stitched without it.
“Patients had to endure the pain,” Sambale said. Suddenly he is summoned — another pregnant woman had shown up.
Clutching her swollen belly, 26-year-old Reve Rose was writhing in agony while rolling on her side on a wooden bench as her nervous husband looked on. Her first child was not due until around Christmas but she feared she was in labour already. Sambale felt her belly and tried to calm her down, certain it was just a panic attack.