Just five days after Super Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the Philippines, panic is beginning to set in among residents of Tacloban and other destroyed villages.
Eight people were crushed to death when a crowd stormed a rice warehouse near Tacloban. More than 100,000 bags of rice were stolen by the mob before police and military troops were able to quell the riot.
Residents in parts of Tacloban were also digging up underground pipes and smashing them open to find water.
The official death toll continues to climb and stood at 2,275 as of Thursday morning. United Nations workers on the ground are expecting the total to climb significantly despite the Philippine president announcing that only a few thousand likely died in the storm rather than earlier estimates of tens of thousands.
U.S. military personnel have been evacuating people from Tacloban to Manila for medical treatment. Soldiers reported seeing roads with bodies lined up for miles awaiting the government to pick them up for burial.
The mayor of Typhoon destroyed Tacloban is telling residents to flee the destroyed city.
Mayor Alfred Romualdez told residents to leave after gunmen firing on the convoy stopped the city’s first attempt at a mass burial. The bodies had to be returned to a gathering place by the remnants of city hall where the stench was overwhelming.
The mayor said that the city does not have enough trucks and heavy equipment to distribute relief that is piling up at the Tacloban airport.
“I have to decide at every meeting which is more important, relief goods or picking up cadavers,” Romualdez said.
Government officials say the Philippine military is stretched so thin it’s impossible to provide security for cities like Tacloban.
On Friday morning, the Philippines was hit by one of the strongest storms ever recorded, Super Typhoon Haiyan. The massive storm brought tremendously powerful winds, flash floods, and landslides killing thousands and devastating the area. Here are photographs of the damage Super Typhoon Haiyan has caused.
The massive devastation in the Philippines and the overwhelmed police & military officials on the islands is leading to conditions of lawlessness and looting.
Officials reported shooting dead two men who were part of a gang that tried to raid and hijack a series of trucks carrying relief supplies. In several towns, shopkeepers are using deadly force and working in around-the-clock shifts to provide armed security for their stores to prevent looting.
Prisoners from local jails were released and told to try and save themselves from the storm and police have made no effort to recapture them.
The Philippine government has sent in columns of armored vehicles to Tacloban and other ruined communities in an attempt to stop the looting and violence. However, without bringing clean water and food to the same regions, officials say it’s likely the actions of desperate people will magnify an already bad situation.
One store owner told the Daily Mail they cannot understand why someone would steal televisions and washing machines when it’s harder to find food or water.
The death toll from Super Typhoon Haiyan continues to climb as makeshift mortuaries are being set up outside buildings that remain mostly intact. Police and soldiers tell various media outlets that they are finding entire towns wiped out because of the storm surges and wind gusts of the typhoon.
The governor of Samar province said the entire town of Basey was gone and its 2,000 residents are missing.
And complicating efforts is Tropical Storm Zoraida is now hovering over the area impacted by Haiyan dumping more rain and causing more flooding. Search and rescue efforts were suspended for hours Tuesday because of heavy rains.
One official told the Daily Mail “two out of every five dead are children.”
The town of Baco, a city of 35,000, remains 80% underwater and officials cannot even access most of the community to search for victims.
Health officials are already raising the alarm over disease as many residents are beginning to show signs of dysentery. The officials lament the lack of clean water in the region and the inability to get equipment to clean water to the villages hit hardest by the storm.
The U.S. military has dispatched aid and troops to some of the areas of the Philippines that were hardest-hit by a deadly typhoon Friday, providing the first outside help of what is expected to be a major aid mission in the coming days and weeks.
Two U.S. C-130 transport planes containing water, generators, and a contingent of Marines flew from Manila’s Vilamor air base to the city of Tacloban, where officials fear that Typhoon Haiyan may have killed as many as 10,000 people.
A U.S. Marine brigadier general who took a helicopter flight over Tacloban says “every single building” was destroyed or severely damaged. Paul Kennedy spoke as supplies were unloaded from the two Marine C-130 planes.
Source: FOX News – FOX News: US sends water, generators, and troops to aid deadly typhoon survivors
As many as 10,000 people are believed to have died in one Philippine city alone when one of the worst storms on record sent giant sea waves, washing away homes, schools and airport buildings, officials said Sunday. Ferocious winds ravaged several central islands, burying people under tons of debris and leaving corpses hanging from trees.
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 slammed 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.
Source: The Huffington Post – The Huffington Post: Philippines Typhoon Death Toll Rises In Storm’s Aftermath
After most major media reports focused on the massive devastation to the Philippine city of Tacloban where at least 10,000 are feared dead, the Philippine Red Cross has released information that the damage in that city is being reported all along the coastline.
Samar, located across the Gulf of Leyte, is still unreachable in many areas by government officials and military troops. Villages all along the coastline were swamped with waves of 20 feet or more and some small fishing villages are completely gone.
The Philippine Armed Forces Central Command said their official death toll is 942 but that with so many places still inaccessible to military troops and the counts of the dead nowhere near done in places they can reach, that total is not even close to a full accounting of victims.
Residents moving seven miles outside of downtown Tacloban to the city’s airport are describing the situation as “worse than hell.” One woman yelled at President Benigno Aquino to get international help to their nation now.
Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez, who barely escaped being killed himself, said that he does not know a single person who has not lost at least one close relative in the storm.
Aid workers are now concerned for survivors because drinking water from wells is likely contaminated and that disease could cause thousands of deaths over the next few weeks.
The U.S. military is joining forces from around the world in rushing to the Philippines to help in search and rescue after the strongest storm in recorded history destroyed entire towns.
Two U.S. C-130 planes with water, generators and U.S. Marines flew to the city of Tacloban where officials say Super Typhoon Haiyan killed at least 10,000 people. The Marines will help in search and rescue along with working to help restore communications throughout the region.
The Philippine National Red Cross said their efforts to help those who lost everything in the storm is being hampered by attacks from looters. The group says an entire shipment of food and relief supplies was hijacked from a port city where the items were on the way to rescuers.
The government says it is considering a state of emergency and martial law in the region because of the looting and other civil disruptions that threat the local government’s ability to help those in need.
Authorities say at least 2 million people have lost or damaged homes as a result of the storm. The storm surges from the Super Typhoon were so strong that large ships such as oil transports were washed into the middle of coastal towns.
While over 800,000 people were evacuated before the storm’s arrival, the thousands were killed because shelters like schools, churches and government buildings could not withstand the high wind and storm surges.
The Red Cross is estimating that at least 1,200 people are dead from Super Typhoon Haiyan.
The Philippines’ Disaster and Risk Reduction and Management Council said at least 350,000 people have been confirmed to have lost their homes because of the storm with that number expected to markedly rise in the next few days.
A witness told the Associated Press that he was ripped away from his home by flood water.
“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,” Sandy Torotoro told the AP.
The storm surge devastated the airport in Tacloban airport.
“It was like a tsunami,” airport manager Efran Nagrama said. “We escaped through the windows and I held on to a pole for about an hour as rain, seawater and wind swept through the airport. Some of my staff survived by clinging to trees.”
Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of a UN disaster assessment co-ordination team said the last time he had seen damage on this level was in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
The storm at one point was so large that it covered the entire nation of the Philippines. The width of the storm measured over the distance between Florida and Canada and packed winds of 195 miles per hour at landfall. The storm moved across the islands at an average speed of 41 miles per hour which officials say likely helped decrease the amount of landslides and flash flooding.
Forecasters now believe the storm will weaken before making landfall late Sunday in central Vietnam.