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| A child waits with fellow typhoon survivors as they line up in the hopes of boarding an evacuation flight on a C-130 military transport plane Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2013, in Tacloban, central Philippines. Thousands of typhoon survivors swarmed the airport on Tuesday seeking a flight out, but only a few hundred made it, leaving behind a shattered, rain-lashed city short of food and water and littered with countless bodies. |
TACLOBAN,
Philippines (AP) -- Desperately needed food, water and medical aid
are only trickling into this city that took the worst blow from Typhoon
Haiyan, while thousands of victims jammed the damaged airport Tuesday,
seeking to be evacuated.
"We need help.
Nothing is happening. We haven't eaten since yesterday afternoon,"
pleaded a weeping Aristone Balute, an 81-year-old woman who failed to
get a flight out of Tacloban for Manila, the capital. Her clothes were
soaked from a pouring rain and tears streamed down her face.
Five
days after the deadly disaster, aid is coming - pallets of supplies and
teams of doctors are waiting to get into Tacloban - but the challenges
of delivering the assistance means few in the stricken city have
received help. Officials also were working to determine how many people
had been killed, with the country's president saying the death toll
could be lower than earlier feared.
"There is a
huge amount that we need to do. We have not been able to get into the
remote communities," U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said in
Manila, launching an appeal for $301 million to help the more than 11
million people estimated to be affected by the storm.
"Even
in Tacloban, because of the debris and the difficulties with logistics
and so on, we have not been able to get in the level of supply that we
would want to. We are going to do as much as we can to bring in more,"
she said. Her office said she planned to visit the city.
Presidential
spokesman Edwin Lacierda said relief goods were getting into the city,
and the supply should increase now that the airport and a bridge to the
island were open.
"We are not going to leave
one person behind - one living person behind," he said. "We will help,
no matter how difficult, no matter how inaccessible."
Tacloban,
a city of about 220,000 people on Leyte island, bore the full force of
the winds and the tsunami-like storm surges Friday. Most of the city is
in ruins, a tangled mess of destroyed houses, cars and trees. Malls,
garages and shops have all been stripped of food and water by hungry
residents.
The loss of life appears to be
concentrated in Tacloban and surrounding areas, including a portion of
Samar island that is separated from Leyte island by a strait. It is
possible that other devastated areas are so isolated they have not yet
been reached.
In Cebu, to the southwest, the
Philippine air force has been sending three C-130s back and forth to
Tacloban from dawn to dusk, and had delivered 400,000 pounds of relief
supplies, Lt. Col. Marciano Jesus Guevara said. A lack of electricity in
Tacloban means planes can't land there at night.
Guevara
said the C-130s have transported nearly 3,000 civilians out of the
disaster zone, and that the biggest problem in Tacloban is a lack of
clean drinking water.
"Water is life," he said. "If you have water with no food, you'll survive."
A
team from Médecins Sans Frontières, complete with medical supplies,
arrived in Cebu island Saturday looking for a flight to Tacloban, but
hadn't left by Tuesday. A spokesman for the group said it was "difficult
to tell" when it would be able to leave.
"We
are in contact with the authorities, but the (Tacloban) airport is only
for the Philippines military use," Lee Pik Kwan said in a telephone
interview.
An Associated Press reporter drove
through Tacloban for about 7 kilometers (4 miles) and saw more than 40
bodies. There was no evidence of any organized delivery of food, water
or medical supplies, though piles of aid have begun to arrive at the
airport. Some people lined up to get water from a hose, presumably from
the city supply.
Doctors in Tacloban said they
were desperate for medicine. At small makeshift clinic with shattered
windows beside the city's ruined airport tower, army and air force
medics said they had treated around 1,000 people for cuts, bruises,
lacerations and deep wounds.
"It's
overwhelming," said air force Capt. Antonio Tamayo. "We need more
medicine. We cannot give anti-tetanus vaccine shots because we have
none."
The longer survivors go without access
to clean water, food, shelter and medical help, the greater chance of
disease breaking out and people dying as a result of wounds sustained in
the storm.
Thousands of typhoon victims were
trying to get out of Tacloban. They camped at the airport and ran onto
the tarmac when planes came in, surging past a broken iron fence and a
few soldiers and police trying to control them. Most didn't make it
aboard the military flights out of the city.
Damaged
infrastructure and bad communications links made a conclusive death
toll difficult to estimate. The official toll from a national disaster
agency rose to 1,774 on Tuesday.
Earlier, two
officials on the ground had said they feared as many as 10,000 might be
dead, but in a televised interview on CNN on Tuesday, President Benigno
Aquino III said the death toll could be closer to 2,000 or 2,500.
The dead, decomposing and stinking, litter the streets or are buried in the debris.
There
is also growing concern about recovering corpses from throughout the
disaster zone. "It really breaks your heart when you see them," said
Maj. Gen. Romeo Poquiz, commander of the 2nd Air Division.
"We're
limited with manpower, the expertise, as well as the trucks that have
to transport them to different areas for identification," Poquiz said.
"Do we do a mass burial, because we can't identify them anymore? If we
do a mass burial, where do you place them?"
Most
Tacloban residents spent a rainy night 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.
"There is no help coming in. They know
this is a tragedy. They know our needs are urgent. Where is the
shelter?" said Aristone Balute's granddaughter, Mylene, who was also at
the airport. "We are confused. We don't know who is in charge."
Damaged
roads and other infrastructure are complicating relief efforts.
Government officials and police and army officers are in many cases
among the victims themselves, hampering coordination. The typhoon
destroyed military buildings that housed 1,000 soldiers in Leyte
province.
There were other distractions,
including a jailbreak in Tacloban. Army Brig. Gen. Virgilio Espineli,
the deputy regional military commander, said he wasn't sure how many of
the 600 inmates fled.
At Matnog, the port for
ferries leaving for Samar island, dozens of trucks piled high with aid
were waiting to cross. In Manila, soldiers loaded pallets of water,
medical supplies and food into C-130 planes bound for the disaster area.
The
U.N. said it had released $25 million in emergency funds to pay for
shelter materials and household items, and for assistance with the
provision of health services, safe water supplies and sanitation
facilities.
The USS George Washington is
headed toward the region with massive amounts of water and food, but the
Pentagon said the aircraft carrier won't arrive until Thursday. The
U.S. also said it is providing $20 million in immediate aid.
Aid
totaling tens of millions of dollars has been pledged by many other
countries, including Japan, Australia and Britain, which is sending a
Royal Navy vessel.
For now, relief has come to
a lucky few, including Joselito Caimoy, a 42-year-old truck driver. He
was able to get his wife, son and 3-year-old daughter on a flight out of
Tacloban. They embraced in a tearful goodbye, but Caimoy stayed behind
to guard what's left of his home and property.
"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," he said. "They're empty. People
are hungry. And they (the authorities) cannot control the people."
The
storm also killed eight people in southern China and inflicted hundreds
of millions of dollars in damage to farming and fishing industries,
Chinese state media reported Tuesday.
The
Philippines, an archipelago nation of more than 7,000 islands, is
annually buffeted by tropical storms and typhoons, but Haiyan was an
especially large catastrophe. Its winds were among the strongest ever
recorded, and it may have killed more people than the previous deadliest
Philippine storm, Thelma, in which about 5,100 people died in the
central Philippines in 1991.
The country's
deadliest disaster on record was the 1976 magnitude-7.9 earthquake that
triggered a tsunami in the Moro Gulf in the southern Philippines,
killing 5,791 people.
Tacloban is near Red
Beach on Leyte Island, where U.S. Gen. Douglas MacArthur waded ashore in
1944 during World War II and fulfilled his famous pledge: "I shall
return." The scene is re-created in a monument on the shore. After the
typhoon, one of the seven statues - but not the one of MacArthur himself
- was toppled over.
