10,000 feared dead in storm
Filipinos say surge tree-high
TACLOBAN, Philippines — The death toll from one of the strongest storms on record that ravaged the central Philippine city of Tacloban could reach 10,000 people, officials said today after the extent of devastation became apparent and horrified survivors spoke of storm surges as high as trees and winds sounding like the roar of a jumbo jet.
Regional police chief Elmer Soria said he was briefed by Leyte provincial Gov. Dominic Petilla late Saturday and told there were about 10,000 deaths in the province, mostly by drowning and from collapsed buildings. The governor’s figure was based on reports from village officials in areas where Typhoon Haiyan blew through Friday.
Tacloban city administrator Tecson Lim said that the death toll in the city alone “could go up to
10,000.” Tacloban is the Leyte provincial capital of 200,000 people and the biggest city on Leyte Island.
About 300 to 400 bodies have already been recovered and there are “still a lot under the debris,” Lim said. A mass burial was planned today in Palo, a town near Tacloban.
Leo Dacaynos of Samar province’s disaster office said today that 300 people have been confirmed dead in Basey town and another 2,000 are missing.
That’s in addition to 10,000 people believed to have died in Leyte province, adjacent to Samar.
The typhoon barreled through six central Philippine islands Friday, wiping away buildings and leveling seaside homes with ferocious winds of 147 mph and gusts of 170 mph. By those measurements, Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., and nearly in the top category, a 5.
“The rescue operation is ongoing. We expect a very high number of fatalities as well as injured,” Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said after visiting Tacloban on Saturday. “All systems, all vestiges of modern living — communications, power, water — all are down. Media is down, so there is no way to communicate with the people in a mass sort of way.”
Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same, but have different names in different parts of the world.
Haiyan weakened earlier today to 101 mph with stronger gusts as it approached central and northern Vietnam, where authorities have evacuated more than 500,000 people. It was forecast to make landfall there Monday morning.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said at a news briefing Saturday evening in Manila that he would visit the hardest-hit areas today.
The Philippine Red Cross and its partners were preparing for a major relief effort “because of the magnitude of the disaster,” said the agency’s chairman, Richard Gordon.
A United Nations disaster assessment team visited the area Saturday.
“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, the head of the team, said in a statement, referring to the 2004 tsunami that devastated coastal swaths of Indonesia and other countries. “This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed, and the streets are strewn with debris.
“The roads between the airport and the town are completely blocked,” he said, “and relief operations will be extremely difficult.”
The airport in Tacloban, about 360 miles southeast of Manila, looked like a muddy wasteland of debris Saturday, with crumpled tin roofs and upturned cars. The airport tower’s windows were shattered, and air force helicopters were busy flying in and out at the start of relief operations.
“The devastation is, I don’t have the words for it,” Roxas said. “It’s really horrific. It’s a great human tragedy.”
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said Aquino was “speechless” when told 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.”
U.S. Marine Corps Col. Mike Wylie surveyed the damage in Tacloban in preparation for possible American assistance. “The storm surge came in fairly high and there is significant structural damage and trees blown over,” said Wylie, who is a member of the U.S.-Philippines Military Assistance Group based in Manila.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement that America “stands ready to help.”
At the request of the Philippine government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed U.S. Pacific Command to deploy ships and aircraft to support search-and-rescue operations and airlift emergency supplies, according to a statement released by the Defense Department press office.
The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, said in a message to Aquino that the commission had sent a team to assist the Philippine authorities and that “we stand ready to contribute with urgent relief and assistance if so required in this hour of need.”
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-yearold 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, holding on to the few things 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.
“It was like a 747 flying just above my roof,” he said, describing the sound of the winds. He said his family and some of his neighbors whose houses were destroyed took shelter in his basement.
Philippine broadcaster ABS-CBN showed fierce winds whipping buildings and vehicles as storm surges swamped Tacloban with debris-laden floodwaters.
In the aftermath of the typhoon, people were seen weeping while retrieving bodies of loved ones inside buildings and on a street that was littered with fallen trees, roofing material and other building parts torn off in the storm’s fury. All that was left of one large building where the walls were smashed in were the skeletal remains of its rafters.
Many packed evacuation centers collapsed in Tacloban as the typhoon raged, a police official said. He said he saw a popular mall being looted Saturday by residents who carted away anything they could lay their hands on, including a flatscreen TV, a small refrigerator, food items, clothes and even a Christmas tree. Smaller shops with guards brandishing their pistols were spared, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
ABS-CBN television news anchor Ted Failon, who was able to report only briefly Friday from Tacloban, said the storm surge was “like the tsunami in Japan.”
“The sea engulfed Tacloban,” he said, explaining that a major part of the city is surrounded on three sides by the waters between Leyte and Samar islands.
The Philippine television station GMA reported that its news team saw 11 bodies, including that of a child, washed ashore Friday and 20 more bodies at a pier in Tacloban hours after the typhoon ripped through the coastal city.
About two dozen more bodies were taken to a church in the nearby town of Palo that was used as an evacuation center but had to be abandoned when its roofs were blown away, the TV network reported. TV images showed howling winds peeling off tin roof sheets during heavy rain.
Ferocious winds felled large branches and snapped coconut trees. A man was shown carrying the body of his 6-year-old daughter who had drowned, and another image showed vehicles piled up in debris.
Tim Ticar, a local tourism officer, said 6,000 foreign and Philippine tourists were stranded on the popular resort island of Boracay, one of the resort spots in the typhoon’s path.
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 rapidly with emergency assistance, according to a statement released by the U.N. spokesman’s office.
UNICEF estimated that about 1.7 million children are living in areas affected by the typhoon, according to the agency’s representative in the Philippines, Tomoo Hozumi. UNICEF’s supply division in Copenhagen was loading 66 tons of relief supplies for an emergency airlift expected to arrive Tuesday in the Philippines.
According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, the deadliest storm in Philippine history was Tropical Storm Thelma, which flooded the town of Ormoc, on Leyte Island, on Nov. 15, 1991, and killed more than 5,000 people.
CROP DAMAGE
High winds have damaged about half of the Philippines’ sugar cane-growing areas and a third of its rice-producing land, according to Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Md.
“Winds were so intense in this system that a lot of the crop is just going to be flattened,” said David Streit, an agricultural meteorologist with the group, said Friday.
Typhoon Haiyan’s total economic toll may reach $14 billion, about $2 billion of which will be insured, according to a report by Jonathan Adams, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Industries, citing Kinetic Analysis Corp.
TOWARD VIETNAM
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung ordered regional officials to closely monitor Haiyan’s movement and called for boats to find shelter as the storm approaches. He also ordered authorities to reinforce houses, shelters and move people away from dangerous areas.
“The evacuation is being conducted with urgency,” disaster official Nguyen Thi Yen Linh said from central Danang City, where some 76,000 were being moved to safety.
Hundreds of thousands of others were being taken to shelters in the provinces of Quang Ngai, Quang Nam and Thua Thien Hue. Schools were closed and two deputy prime ministers were sent to the region to direct the preparations.
The middle part of central Vietnam and north Central Highlands will experience heavy rain, according to the country’s National Center for Hydro-meteorological Forecasting.