Typhoon slams Philippines
Three killed, thousands made homeless as monster winds tear apart homes
manila — One of the most intense typhoons on record whipped the Philippines on Friday, killing at least three people and terrifying millions as monster winds tore apart homes.
Super Typhoon Haiyan smashed into coastal communities on the central island of Samar, about 600 kilometres southeast of Manila, before dawn on Friday with maximum sustained winds of about 315 kilometres an hour.
“It was frightening. The wind was so strong, it was so loud, like a screaming woman. I could see trees being toppled down,” said Liwayway Sabuco, a saleswoman from Catbalogan, a major city on Samar.
The government said three people had been confirmed killed and another man was missing after he fell off a gangplank in the central port of Cebu.
But the death toll was expected to rise, with authorities unable to immediately contact the worst affected areas and Haiyan only expected to leave the Philippines in the evening.
An average of 20 major storms or typhoons, many of them deadly, batter the Philippines each year.
The developing country is particularly vulnerable because it is often the first major landmass for the storms after they build over the Pacific Ocean.
The Philippines suffered the world’s strongest storm of 2012, when Typhoon Bopha left about 2,000 people dead or missing on the southern island of Mindanao.
But Haiyan’s wind strength made it one of the four most powerful typhoons ever recorded in the world, and the most intense to have made landfall, according to Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at US-based Weather Underground.
Haiyan generated wind gusts of 379 kilometres an hour on Friday morning, according to the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Centre.
Masters said the previous record for the strongest typhoon to make landfall was Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi in the United States with sustained winds of 190 miles an hour in 1969.
In Tacloban, a city of more than 200,000 people close to where Haiyan made landfall, corrugated iron sheets were ripped off roofs and floated with the wind before crashing into buildings, according to video footage taken by a resident.
Flash floods also turned Tacloban’s streets into rivers, while a photo from an ABS-CBN television reporter showed six bamboo houses washed away along a beach more than 200 kilometres to the south.
Authorities expressed initial confidence that the death toll from Haiyan would not climb dramatically, citing a massive effort starting two days before the typhoon hit to evacuate those in vulnerable areas and make other preparations.
More than 718,000 people had sought shelter in evacuation centres, 3,000 ferries had been locked down at ports and hundreds of flights were cancelled, according to the national disaster management council’s spokesmen, Reynaldo Balido.
“In terms of damage, we cannot avoid that... but the silver lining here is that the casualties are only three as of now,” he said in Manila. —