Share
November 11, 2013
Stephen Exley It has been described as “complete devastation” and “horrific.” But it is hard to find the words to do justice to the carnage left behind by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. As many as 10,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the storm, which reached the country’s eastern provinces of Leyte and Samar on Friday, before sweeping across six more islands.
Share
Stephen Exley
It has been described as “complete devastation” and “horrific.” But
it is hard to find the words to do justice to the carnage left behind
by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.
As many as 10,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the
storm, which reached the country’s eastern provinces of Leyte and Samar
on Friday, before sweeping across six more islands.
More than 630,000 people are believed to have been displaced.
Another 9.5 million across the country have been left without food,
water or shelter.
Although a massive international relief operation rapidly got under
way, initial efforts were largely thwarted by damage to infrastructure
such as roads and airports, leaving rescue workers unable to reach many
towns and villages.
“There’s an awful lot of casualties, a lot of people dead all over
the place, a lot of destruction,” Richard Gordon, head of the
Philippine Red Cross, told reporters. “It’s absolute bedlam right now,
but hopefully it will turn out better as more and more supplies get
into the area.”
Several towns were virtually destroyed by the typhoon which, at its
peak, recorded wind speeds of almost 200 mph. Much of the damage was
caused by the surge of water into coastal areas: in the city of
Tacloban, one of the worst-affected places, it reached a height of 19
feet.
The town of Guiuan in Samar province – population 40,000 – is
reported to have been largely destroyed, while several settlements in
the north of Cebu province suffered damage of between 80 and 90 per
cent. Eighty per cent of Baco, a city of 35,000 in Oriental Mindoro
province, was left under water, according to the United Nations.
“Entire parts of the coastline just disappeared,” said Jane Cocking,
Oxfam’s humanitarian director. “Sizeable trees just bent over and
[were] thrown about like matchsticks.”
The United States has sent $20 million in immediate aid to provide
food, water and sanitation resources, and the US military is providing
support for the distribution of relief supplies. Despite this, it is
clear that much more support will be needed to deal with the fallout from the
disaster.
The storm has now made landfall in Vietnam, near the Chinese border,
but has been downgraded to tropical storm status. Even so, the
Vietnamese authorities moved almost 900,000 people to safe areas in the
northern provinces to minimize potential loss of life.
On Tuesday morning the official death toll stood at 1,744, but this
figure will inevitably increase significantly in the coming days.
