TACLOBAN, the Philippines — After touring miles of roofless homes and shattered shantytowns destroyed by one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday announced that additional American humanitarian aid would be sent to the Philippines and described the giant typhoon as a warning of future extreme weather in a warming world.
“No words can do justice to the level of destruction we’ve seen in this entire community,” Mr. Kerry said. “This is a devastation that is unlike anything I’ve seen at this kind of scale.”
An initial severe shortage of food and clean water in the first two weeks after Typhoon Haiyan made landfall on Nov. 8 has largely been alleviated. But four million people lost their homes to towering storm surge waves or gusts reaching 200 miles per hour, and the effort to rebuild them has barely begun.
The Philippine government raised the official death toll on Wednesday to 6,069, with 27,665 injured and 1,779 missing. But local officials say the number of dead will continue to rise as more bodies are uncovered in the debris.
Running water has been restored in some central areas of Tacloban but is still not available across large areas of devastated Leyte and Samar Islands. Full electricity service will take months to restore.
Mr. Kerry acknowledged the difficulty of applying climate science to any single meteorological event, but cited the destruction here as a caution about what could happen if the world does not limit emissions of greenhouse gases.
“While no single storm can be attributed to climate change, we do know to a certainty that rising temperatures will lead to longer and more unpredictable monsoon seasons and will lead to more extreme weather events,” Mr. Kerry said. “Looking around here, you see an unmistakable example of what an extreme weather event looks like, and a reminder of our responsibility to act to protect the future.”
Saying that Tacloban still looked like a war zone despite nearly six weeks of recovery efforts, Mr. Kerry announced that Washington would donate $24.6 million immediately for typhoon relief on top of the $62 million in aid already supplied by the United States. He said t the United States would consider further requests for relief from a reconstruction planning effort now underway in Manila, the capital.
President Benigno S. Aquino III of the Philippines said in a speech in Manila on Wednesday that the typhoon had inflicted $12.9 billion in damage and economic losses. He predicted that the rebuilding of the devastated region would last through 2017.
As part of a conference in Geneva on Monday that focused mainly on the need for humanitarian relief for refugees from Syria but included other crises around the globe, the United Nations requested $791 million to help typhoon victims, and said it had been able to raise only 30 percent of the money so far. The United Nations and the Red Cross have urgently appealed to foreign countries for four million heavy-duty corrugated steel sheets needed to replace roofs, as the Philippines has already used up most of the 120,000 it had in stock and has very limited ability to manufacture more.
The government has updated the death toll daily, but has left the number of missing unchanged for more than two weeks. Tacloban, a sprawling city of nearly 500,000 permanent and temporary residents, has a single small office to accept missing-person reports, and many residents said in interviews here over the last two weeks that they were not even aware that it existed.
Benjoe Cabacaba, a resident of the coastal San Jose neighborhood, said on Wednesday that his parents, his father-in-law, two sisters, a cousin, a close friend and six nieces and nephews had all vanished when storm surge waves as high as the coconut palms had crashed over their homes. Nobody has reported any of them missing, Mr. Cabacaba said, adding that he did not know if their bodies had ended up in a mass grave for the unidentified dead or were among the many swept out to sea and never seen again.
“We don’t know what to do” to report family members as missing, he said. “We can barely find food to eat on a daily basis — all my focus is on getting enough food for my family. It’s the same for everyone here.”
Jerry Yaokasin, the deputy mayor of Tacloban, said there was a strong reluctance at all levels of government to acknowledge the full death toll, but declined to discuss the reasons.
The Philippine government considerably underestimated the death toll, particularly in the early days. Mr. Aquino said right after the typhoon hit that the death toll was likely to be 2,000 to 2,500.
The government initially sent only 2,000 soldiers to Leyte Island, where virtually all one and a half million people lost their homes and more than 5,000 died. The troops were unable to restore order for nearly a week as looting paralyzed Philippine cities, Tacloban in particular.
An international outcry over the scale of the devastation, prompted by extensive news media reports, led the Philippines to expand its effort considerably. It acted to some extent after the United States had already begun pouring troops and aircraft into the area and installed a much-needed mobile air traffic control unit at the shattered airport.
Mayor Alfred Romualdez of Tacloban told Mr. Kerry that some older residents of the city, after seeing the American military’s extensive deployment of soldiers and aircraft here to bring in relief goods, said, “The last time we experienced something like this was when the Americans landed during the war.” American and Filipino troops led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur stormed the beaches of Tacloban in an amphibious assault in 1944 that began the liberation of the Philippines from Japanese rule during World War II.
Mr. Aquino and Mr. Romualdez both spoke of building more typhoon-resilient communities to prepare for a climate that may produce more powerful storms in the future. Mr. Kerry said in a brief interview after his tour of Tacloban, “There are all kinds of signs, all signaling serious impacts from long-term climate change.”
Yet many residents here are already rebuilding on sites that were flattened by the storm surge during Typhoon Haiyan, despite threats by local and national officials to declare oceanfront sites as no-build zones.
On a recent afternoon, Pio Canayong, 30, was rebuilding his grandparents’ home, which lay more than 50 yards from the shore but where little remained except an orange tile floor. Numerous squatter huts are also being rebuilt between the remains of the Canayong family home and the water’s edge.
Incongruously sitting further inland than all the construction is a 140-foot ocean freighter that careened through the original buildings during the storm surge. Mr. Canayong described how the freighter demolished the house and killed two of his grandparents in front of him as he dived to safety in front of the ship’s bow. His mother and four siblings also died.
Mr. Canayong was nonetheless gathering materials to rebuild, saying that the land was his family’s sole remaining possession. “I don’t want to move away,” he said.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/19/world/asia/typhoon-haiyan-philippines-aid.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/People/B/Bradsher,%20Keith?ref=keithbradsher&pagewanted=print
