‘We have to flee’

TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines - – Decomposing bodies still line the roads, one wearing a pink, short-sleeve shirt and blue shorts lying face down in a black, muddy puddle 100 yards from the airport. Further on down is a church that was supposed to be an evacuation center but is now littered with the bodies of those who drowned inside.

Miriam Refugio, 60, among the thousands of survivors, swarmed the airport seeking a flight out of the corpse-choked wasteland.

“Our home was destroyed, there is no food in this town, so we have to flee,” she said, standing with her teenage granddaughter, waiting for a chance to get on a flight to Manila.

Just after dawn yesterday, two Philippine Air Force C-130s arrived at its destroyed airport along with several commercial and private flights.

Remains in body bags are piled in a lot in Tacloban.

 

More than 3,000 people who camped out at the building surged onto the tarmac past a broken iron fence to get on the aircraft. Just a dozen soldiers and several police held them back.

Mothers raised their babies high above their heads in the rain, in hopes of being prioritized. One woman in her 30s lay on a stretcher, shaking uncontrollably. Only a small number managed to board.

“I was pleading with the soldiers. I was kneeling and begging because I have diabetes,” said Helen Cordial, whose house was destroyed in the storm.

“Do they want me to die in this airport? They are stone hearted.”

At least a dozen US and Philippine military cargo planes have arrived since Monday, with the Philippine Air Force saying it had flown in about 60,000 kilograms of relief supplies since Saturday. But the demand is huge and the supplies aren’t reaching those who need it most.

“People are roaming around the city, looking for food and water,” said Christopher Pedrosa, a government aid worker.

Aid trucks from the airport struggle to enter the city because of the stream of people and vehicles leaving it. On motorbikes, trucks or by foot, people clog the road to the airport, clutching scarves to their faces to blot out the dust and stench of bodies.

Joselito Caimoy, a 42-year-old truck driver, was one of the lucky ones at Tacloban airport. He was able to get his wife, son and three-year-old daughter on a flight out. They embraced in a tearful goodbye, but Caimoy stayed behind to guard what’s left of his home and property.

“There is no water, no food,” he said. “People are just scavenging in the streets. People are asking food from relatives, friends. The devastation is too much... the malls, the grocery stories have all been looted. They’re empty. People are hungry. And they (the authorities) cannot control the people.”

Bare shelves

As a violet sunset melted on Monday evening into the nearly total darkness of a city without electricity, lighted only by a waxing half-moon, some dispirited residents walked home. Others lay down in the ruins of the airport terminal after another day of waiting in hope of fresh water, food or a flight out.

Most residents spent the night under pouring rain wherever they could – in the ruins of destroyed houses, in the open along roadsides and shredded trees. Some slept under tents brought in by the government or relief groups.

Others resorted to looting grocery stores and pharmacies across the city, leaving bare shelves for a population quickly growing hungry and thirsty.

In Ormoc City, also in Leyte, residents are getting desperate for food and supplies and there are reports that some have started eating stray dogs.

Desperate residents in Tacloban stripped malls, shops and homes of food, water and consumer goods. Officials said some of the looting smacked of desperation but in other cases people hauled away TVs, refrigerators, Christmas trees and even a treadmill.

Also cleared out is a bottling factory for beer and soft drinks. In some areas, Coca-Cola was handed out free while drinking water was impossible to find. Officials were warning residents not to drink water from wells, which were likely polluted.

Some police special forces and soldiers were sent to guard against further chaos.

Soldiers have resorted to firing warning shots into the air to stop people stealing fuel from a petrol station.

But there is another reason the looting had abated.

“There is nothing left to loot,” remarked Pedrosa.

Caught unprepared

When a wind-whipped ocean rose Friday night, the ground floors of homes hundreds of yards inland were submerged within minutes, trapping residents like Virginia Basinang, a 54-year-old retired teacher, who suddenly found herself struggling in waist-deep water on the second floor of her home.

Screaming people bobbed in the water that surged through the streets, many grabbing for floating debris.

“Some of them were able to hold on, some were lucky and lived, but most did not,” she said, adding that 14 bodies were left on a wall across the street when the seawater receded a half-hour later. The bodies are still there, and the odor of their decay makes it impossible for Basinang and her family to eat meals at home.

Authorities said they had evacuated 800,000 people ahead of the typhoon, but many evacuation centers proved to be no protection against the strong winds and storm surges.

The Philippine Red Cross, responsible for warning the region and giving advice, said people were not prepared for a storm surge.

“Imagine America, which was prepared and very rich, still had a lot of challenges at the time of Hurricane Katrina, but what we had was three times more than what they received,” said Gwendolyn Pang, Red Cross executive director.

Tacloban City councilor and former actress Ma. Christina Gonzales-Romualdez said nobody in the city was prepared to deal with storm surges.

She said her family retreated to a guest house located further from the sea that had a second floor as authorities warned of storm surges while her husband, Mayor Alfredo Romualdez, was in a nearby family resort inspecting the area as residents there reported that the waters had receded.

But the seawater came rushing back, she said.

Romualdez said she and her children had to cling to the trusses of the ceiling of their house for some two hours as the wind blew away the roof.

She said she saw Alfred after the waters receded and found out that he also clung to the beams of the ceiling in the house closer to the beach.

Gonzales said her family had nothing but their clothes when they walked downtown and some residents and friends gave them a change of clothes.

The mayor was given a pair of shorts and after wearing it, a resident who gave it to him remarked: “Galing din yan sa loot (that was part of the loot).”

Doomed dome

Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan), among the most powerful in history, slammed into Tacloban on Friday and cut a path of devastation barreling west across the archipelago nation.

In its wake, corpses lay along roads lined with splintered homes and toppled power lines, as the living struggled to survive, increasingly desperate for fresh drinking water, food and shelter.

The damage to everything is so great that it is hard even to tally. Mass graves began to fill as relief efforts struggled to get underway.

The roads of this once-thriving city of 220,000 were so clogged with debris from nearby buildings that they were barely discernible. The civilian airport terminal has shattered walls and gaping holes in the roof where steel beams protrude, twisted and torn by winds far more powerful than those of Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall near New Orleans in 2005.

Even by the standards of the Philippines, however, Yolanda was an especially large catastrophe.

One of the saddest and deadliest moments came when hundreds of people flocked to Tacloban’s domed sports arena at the urging of local officials, who believed its sturdy roof would withstand the wind. The roof did, but the arena flooded, and many inside drowned or were trampled in a frenzied rush to higher seats.

The top civil defense official said in an interview after inspecting the damage that the storm surge had been the highest in the country’s modern history. Nothing like this had ever happened, perhaps explaining why so few thought they needed to flee inland and instead went to evacuation centers near the coast.

The sea level rose up to four meters and filled streets and homes deep in the city, propelled by sustained winds of at least 225 kilometers per hour and gusts that were much stronger.

“It was a tsunami-like storm surge; it is the first time,” said Eduardo del Rosario, the executive director of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC).

Del Rosario said the government was still sending out helicopters on Monday to look for communities that had not been heard from since the typhoon.

The government confirmed 1,774 deaths yesterday, and the death toll would “most likely” rise, he said.

Sucked out

Tacloban has been hit by typhoons for decades, but never had the sea risen high enough to pour over the swath of low salt marshes and inundate the city’s shady streets, Del Rosario said.

Tacloban was among the hardest hit in a nation accustomed to misery blown in from the sea. But this storm was like nothing before it, and its devastation was not yet fully understood. Villages along the coasts may have been wiped out, and the toll – at least 10,000 in Tacloban alone are feared dead – was just an estimate.

Relief efforts were complicated by a persistent and heavy rain.

But one of the biggest questions here involves the many people who seem to have disappeared, possibly sucked out to sea when the ocean returned to its usual level.

Rosemary Balais, 39, said a very large proportion, possibly more than half, of the 5,000 people in her hometown, Tanauan, near Tacloban, seemed to be missing.