Typhoon lashes Philippines
Bodies strewn in streets after 147-mph winds ravage city
Soldiers enforcing an evacuation order pass a utility truck Friday in Legazpi in the central Philippines as one of the strongest typhoons on record moved rapidly across a string of islands, forcing nearly 800,000 people to flee their homes and knocking out power and communications. At least 100 people were killed, authorities said.
MANILA, Philippines — One of the strongest storms on record slammed into the central Philippines, killing more than 100 people whose bodies then lay in the streets of one of the hardest-hit cities, an official said today.
Capt. John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, said more than 100 others were injured in the city of Tacloban on Leyte Island, where Typhoon Haiyan hit Friday.
With power and most communications knocked out a day after the typhoon ravaged the central region, Andrew said the information about the deaths was relayed to him by his staff in Tacloban.
“The information is reliable,” he said.
Nearly 800,000 people were forced to flee their homes, and damage was believed to be extensive.
Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 147 mph with gusts of 170 mph when it made landfall. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., nearly in the top category, a 5.
Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same thing. They are just called different names in different parts of the world.
Because communications were out in the Philippines, it was impossible to know the full extent of casualties and damage. Officially, four people had been listed as dead as of this morning, before the latest information from Tacloban came in.
Southern Leyte Gov. Roger Mercado said the typhoon triggered landslides that blocked roads, uprooted trees and ripped roofs off houses around his residence.
The dense clouds and heavy rains made the day seem almost as dark as night, he said.
“When you’re faced with such a scenario, you can only pray, and pray and pray,” Mercado said by telephone, adding that mayors in the province had not called in to report any major damage.
“I hope that means they were spared and not the other way around. My worst fear is there will be massive loss of lives and property.”
Eduardo del Rosario, head of the disaster-response agency, said a powerful typhoon that also hit the central Philippines in 1990 killed 508 people and left 246 missing, but this time authorities had ordered pre-emptive evacuation and other measures to minimize casualties.
He said the speed at which the typhoon sliced through the central islands — 25 mph — helped prevent its 375-mile band of rain clouds from dumping enough of their load to overflow waterways. Flooding from heavy rains is often the main cause of deaths from typhoons.
“It has helped that the typhoon blew very fast in terms of preventing lots of casualties,” regional military commander Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda said. He said the evacuation of villagers before the storm also saved many lives.
Among the evacuees were thousands of residents of Bohol who had been camped in tents and other makeshift shelters since a magnitude-7.2 earthquake hit the island province last month.
Relief workers said they were struggling to find ways to deliver food and other supplies, with roads blocked by landslides and fallen trees.
The storm “unleashed fierce winds and harsh rains that uprooted big trees and toppled electric poles and power lines,” said Aaron Aspi, a spokesman for World Vision in Bohol.
From Samar, the typhoon battered Leyte, then the northern part of Cebu and nearby islands before lashing Panay — islands with some of the best beach resorts in the Philippines.
Dozens of flights in the central and southern Philippines were canceled. A storm surge estimated at 15 feet damaged a seaside airport in Leyte’s Tacloban city. Airport workers moved to the tower and were safe but no other details had been reported because communications were cut by the typhoon, aviation official John Andrews said.
“They’ve been incommunicado. The last message we got from them was that the airport was ruined,” Andrews said.
Andrews said the typhoon also damaged the airport in Kalibo town in Aklan.
World weather experts are calling Hiayan one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record at the time it hit land, but not quite the windiest. There are disputes over just how strong it is because of differences in the way storms are measured.
“In terms of the world I don’t think it’s the strongest,” said Taoyang Peng, a tropical cyclone scientist at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. But he added that “it is one of the strongest typhoons to make landfall” and probably the strongest to hit the Philippines.
The U.S. Joint Typhoon Warning Center put Haiyan’s sustained winds at 196 mph just minutes before it made landfall Thursday, which would be a world record.
However, officials in Tokyo and the Philippines but the wind speed at about 147 mph.
Peng said his group considers Tokyo the authority in this case because it’s the closest regional center to the storm.