Anger Takes Hold in City Ravaged by Typhoon
By KEITH BRADSHER
TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Wearing face masks or pulling their shirts up over their noses to mask the smell of rotting flesh, a procession of typhoon survivors three miles long walked toward the shattered airport here on Tuesday to beg for food, water or a flight out of the chaos of what used to be a city of 220,000.
They witnessed the despair of survivors like Erroll de la Cruz, 34, who squatted next to the pavement to scrawl the names of his wife, Michelle, and her 7-year-old son, Matthew, on a piece of plywood. Then he walked across the crowded road and laid the plywood between their corpses, in the hope that their lives would be remembered, and perhaps their bodies someday traced.
“I don’t think I can handle this by myself,” he said quietly.
The people of Tacloban, on Leyte Island in the east-central Philippines, have been struggling largely on their own for almost five days to deal with the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan, as the civilian and military authorities of the Philippines struggle to cope with a natural disaster of a scope far beyond expectations. The pace of relief flights by the Philippines and United States Air Forces has finally accelerated, but only after a long series of delays and hiccups.
There is no reliable evidence that slow relief work has caused further loss of life. The deaths of the wife and stepson of Mr. de la Cruz, for example, appear to have occurred during the initial rush of wind and water from the storm.
But difficulties in distributing relief assistance have made the lives of the survivors far more difficult.
Some residents were understanding of the delays in distributing food. Lamberto Patau, 31, a bus dispatcher, said more relief shipments had arrived than could be handed out. “There is food, but there is no one to distribute it, because they were all victims,” he said.
The devastation apparent during an eight-mile drive into the city center made the extent of the challenge clear. Mounds of debris up to 15 feet high towered next to the main road. Concrete pillars and other hazards had fallen into the traffic lanes, forcing drivers, motorcyclists and pedestrians to dodge and weave.
Police officers were operating a series of simple checkpoints, built of little more than scraps of wood, to try to restrain unruly behavior. An 8 p.m. curfew has been imposed.
Jennifer Cicco, the administrator of the Leyte Island chapter of the Philippines Red Cross, said the conservative estimate from provincial officials was that in addition to the deaths in Tacloban, a city of 220,000, about 10,000 people had died in surrounding Leyte Province, home to 1.3 million, almost all living on the coast, where many fishing villages were unprepared for the fury of the storm. Some officials have estimated that as many as 10,000 people died in Tacloban alone, although the official death toll for the entire country was 1,798 as of 8 Tuesday evening, according to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
The International Committee of the Red Cross tried to send a dozen truckloads of supplies to Tacloban from Davao in the southern Philippines ahead of the typhoon, only to find that the storm had moved so fast that the trucks did not reach their destination in time. An attempted hijacking of the convoy around 20 miles south of Tacloban by a hungry crowd forced it to stop, and by Tuesday night the roads were still too unsafe for the convoy to proceed, Ms. Cicco said.
Instead of experienced police officers directing the ever-growing crowds at the airport who were trying to flee the city on Tuesday, there were young soldiers with M-16 assault rifles and bandoleers of ammunition.
The airport still had no radar or other effective air traffic control system; it was contacting the relief planes via radio once they came within 9 to 12 miles of the city, and asking them to take turns using the runway. Only small planes with limited capacity, mostly propeller planes, could use the airport, because of the air traffic control problem and the lack of portable staircases for reaching the doorways of larger jets. Virtually all of the airport’s staircases were destroyed by the storm.
In the city, conditions were even worse than on the road. So many rotting bodies lay uncollected in the streets that senior Filipino military officers complained of severe nausea from the stench. Water and food were scarce, and looters picked through the mangled remains of retail stores in the hope of finding anything of value that previous looters might have missed. The municipal prison had released all its prisoners as the typhoon hit the city, urging them to save themselves from drowning. Little effort had yet been made to find them.
Relief operations in this devastated city were slowly starting to pick up Tuesday as the Philippines struggled to cope with the scale of the damage.
Some survivors, however, were growing angry.
“There’s no food coming, but that is not as big a problem as dealing with the dead,” said Juanita Experas, 63, who lives in a village near Tacloban. “There are dead bodies everywhere, and it is making us sick.”
Manuel Aballe, 27, who began the long trudge to the airport with his wife and 2-month-old baby, said, “We have to get out of Tacloban or we will die here of hunger.”
In some ways, the damage in Tacloban is even worse than it was in Indonesia after a giant tsunami swept ashore in 2004. In Indonesian cities like Banda Aceh, the tsunami inundated neighborhoods closest to the coast, but homes, cars and diesel generators farther inland were spared and provided bases for relief efforts.
But in Tacloban, a city wrapped around a horseshoe-shaped bay, the water overflowed from the bay in all directions. It flooded practically everything in sight with fast-moving torrents as the sea level rose as much as 13 feet. Winds exceeding 140 miles per hour tore away the roofs and windows that had withstood the walls of water. Cars were overturned or floated away, their engines ruined.
As people from other towns drive here to search for relatives, they find that there is essentially no gasoline available in the city or nearby. Lines have formed at service stations.
Backyard diesel generators, usually used during blackouts, were also wrecked by the water, so the city has been dark at night, when large bands of looters gather. Virtually no diesel fuel is available at any price, although the government has its own supplies.
Mayor Alfred S. Romualdez of Tacloban said in a brief interview that he was aware of difficulties, but described them as affecting nearby villages more than his own city.
“These communities are very difficult to access,” he said. “Many people are confused and don’t have cellphone service.”
Mr. Romualdez said he had personally lost everything, including his house. But he suggested that reports of damage to Tacloban might have been exaggerated, saying that only a couple of hundred deaths had been confirmed by the authorities.
A Philippine Army colonel acknowledged that it was unusual for soldiers with assault rifles to perform crowd control, like at the Tacloban airport, instead of the police. But the rifles do not have rounds in the chambers, he said, before adding that the soldiers are responsible for their weapons and so carry them everywhere.
The colonel said, “Everything is in chaos.” He insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Despite the many difficulties, there were hints of improvements on Tuesday. The United States sent in C-130 propeller cargo planes at a faster tempo to take survivors to safety. Some roads opened to nearby towns and villages.
But the crowds milling at the airport grew faster than what the Philippine and United States Air Forces were taking out, possibly because word of additional flights had started to spread.
Sally Reyes, who is 29 years old and seven months pregnant, said she had been waiting for four days at the airport with no food or water from the government, only donations from relatives. She has been pleading for a flight out every day, she said, and plans to keep pleading.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.