CEBU, Philippines — One of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded now appears to have devastated cities, towns and fishing villages with heavy loss of life when it played a deadly form of hopscotch across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday.
Barreling across palm-fringed beaches and plowing into frail homes with a force that by some estimates approached that of a tornado, Typhoon Haiyan delivered a crippling blow to a huge area of the country’s midsection. Disorder and looting over the weekend compounded the destruction.
President Benigno S. Aquino III declared a “state of calamity” in provinces across the breadth of the Philippines, a step that releases emergency funds from national coffers.
Those coffers have been depleted this year by a series of other natural disasters, most notably an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 that also struck the middle of the country four weeks ago.
The first and most vocal city to cry for help over the weekend was Tacloban on Leyte Island, which was also one of the first places hit by the typhoon, called Yolanda in the Philippines. In many other communities along the storm’s track, virtually all communications were cut off.
The typhoon left Tacloban in ruins, as a storm surge as high as 13 feet overwhelmed its streets. Reports from the scene said that most of the houses in the city of 220,000 were damaged or destroyed. More than 300 bodies have already been recovered, said Tecson John S. Lim, the city administrator, adding that the toll could reach 10,000 in Tacloban alone.
Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the website Weatherunderground.com, said that the storm surge appeared to have caused many of the deaths. Surges are typical for Atlantic hurricanes, Mr. Masters said, but storms in the Philippines usually do most of their damage through flash flooding, because of the mountainous terrain.
This typhoon moved quickly, though, and did not drench any one area with downpours of rain for long, Mr. Masters said. Instead, the storm’s powerful winds pushed huge amounts of seawater onto the shore in low-lying areas, some of them 10 feet or less above sea level.
Mr. Aquino went to Tacloban on Sunday to meet victims of the storm and coordinate rescue and cleanup efforts. His defense secretary, Voltaire Gazmin, described a chaotic scene there.
“There is no power, no water, nothing,” Mr. Gazmin said. “People are desperate. They’re looting.”
Lynette Lim, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, weathered the storm in a local government office in Tacloban, leaving the city on a military aircraft Sunday morning. She said that even schools, gymnasiums and other sites designated by the local government as evacuation centers had failed to hold up against the powerful winds.
“The roofs had been ripped off, the windows had shattered, and sometimes the ceilings had caved in,” Ms. Lim said in a telephone interview from Manila.
Poor neighborhoods fared especially badly, with virtually no structures left standing except a few government buildings. Looting began by midday on Saturday, with no police officers in sight then or even on Sunday morning, Ms. Lim said. “Everything that could be looted, was,” she said, adding that pharmacies and grocery stores had been picked clean.
The lack of clear information from official sources about the extent of the damage raised the possibility that other areas could have been hit just as badly as Tacloban, where rescue efforts were being concentrated.
News reports from Tacloban told of how officials were unable to get an accurate assessment of the fatalities because law enforcement and government personnel could not be reached after the The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported that the mayor of Tacloban, Alfred S. Romualdez, was found “holding on to his roof” by rescuers.
On Sunday, the typhoon began turning its deadly force toward central and northern Vietnam, where more than 500,000 people were evacuated, though meteorologists said the storm had begun to weaken from the sustained winds of 190 miles an hour that it brought to the Philippines. As the storm neared the mainland, it turned northward, and its eye skirted the Vietnamese coastline.
Aid efforts in the Philippines were complicated by the magnitude of the devastation, as communications systems were shut down by the storm. In addition, the Philippine National Red Cross said its relief efforts were being hampered by looters, including some who attacked trucks of food and other supplies that were being sent from the southern port city of Davao to Tacloban on Sunday, The Associated Press reported.
International aid agencies and foreign governments are also sending emergency teams. At the request of the Philippine government, the United States defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, ordered the deployment of ships and aircraft to bring in emergency supplies and help in the search-and-rescue operations, the Defense Department said.
Approximately 90 American Marines and sailors based in Okinawa landed in the Philippines on Sunday, part of an advance team sent to assess the scope of the disaster and determine what the Pentagon might need to assist in relief work. According to Col. Brad Bartlet, a Marine spokesman, the team has asked for C-130 cargo airplanes, MV-22 Osprey helicopters and other aircraft, and the Navy has sent two P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft. Orions are often used during natural disasters to patrol the seas looking for survivors stranded in ships and boats.
The United States Embassy in Manila made $100,000 immediately available for health and sanitation efforts, its Twitter feed said.
A United Nations disaster assessment team was already on the ground in the area on Sunday. “The last time I saw something on this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, the head of the United Nations team, said in a statement, referring to the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Indonesia and 13 other countries. “This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumbleweed.”
Mar Roxas, the Philippine interior minister, said that while relief supplies had begun to reach Tacloban airport, they could go no farther yet because of debris blocking the roads in the area.
“The entire airport was under water up to roof level,” Mr. Roxas said, according to The Philippine Daily Inquirer. Speaking to reporters in Tacloban, he added, “The devastation here is absolute.”
Photos and television footage from the affected areas showed fierce winds ripping tin roofs off homes and sending waves crashing into wooden buildings that splintered under the force. Large ships were tossed onshore, and vehicles were shown piled atop one another. Video footage from Tacloban showed ocean water rushing through the streets of the city, which is about 360 miles southeast of Manila and is the capital of the province of Leyte.
Robert S. Ziegler, the director general of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños, Philippines, said that he was very concerned that the damage reports seemed to be mainly from Tacloban and not from the many fishing communities that line the coast.
“The coastal areas can be quite vulnerable — in many cases, you have fishing communities right up to the shoreline, and they can be wiped out” by a powerful storm surge of the sort that hit Tacloban, he said. “The disturbing reports are the lack of reports, and the areas that are cut off could be quite severely hit.”
The research institute, which is one of the world’s most famous agricultural research institutes, is near Manila, and far enough north that “all we experienced was some rain and some wind,” Mr. Ziegler said by telephone.
Video from Tacloban on ABS-CBN television showed widespread looting in the city, with scores of people descending on stores and stuffing suitcases and bags with clothing and housewares.
Residents of Cebu, one of the country’s largest cities, said that many roads to the north of Cebu Island were still closed after towns there suffered very heavy damage as the typhoon slammed its way through. The roar of the wind during the typhoon was punctuated by the shattering of windows, residents said, although the city of Cebu itself was spared the brunt of the storm.
“It was very loud, like a train,” said Ranulfo L. Manatad, a night watchman at a street market in Mandaue City, on the northern outskirts of Cebu City.
In Mabolo, another town on the city’s northern outskirts, the winds toppled a locally famous tree with a trunk roughly a yard in diameter that had withstood every typhoon for more than a century. The tree damaged a wall of St. Joseph’s Church, but no one was injured, residents said.
The extent of the damage across the country and the rising death toll threatened to make the typhoon the worst storm in Philippine history. According to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, the deadliest storm to hit the Philippines until now was Tropical Storm Thelma, which flooded the town of Ormoc, on Leyte Island, on Nov. 5, 1991, and killed more than 5,000 people.
On Samar Island, near Tacloban, Leo N. Dacaynos of the local disaster office said the local death toll from the typhoon was at least 300 people, and he said 2,000 others were missing, The Associated Press reported.
The Social Welfare and Development Office said the storm affected 4.28 million people in about 270 towns and cities spread across 36 provinces in the central Philippines.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/world/asia/philippines-typhoon.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print