After thousands of people were likely killed when Typhoon Yolanda, or Hainan, crossed over the Philippines this week, the survivors are looking to find a way out.
A number of people are trapped in their towns, which were leveled and cut off from the rest of the country. Food, water, clothing, and other necessities are scare as aid barely trickles in. With the lack of power and phone lines, residents could not inform relatives in other parts of the country or around the world that they are alive.
A Philippine aid convoy was ambushed on the way to Tacloban City by communist insurgents, prompting the military to fire back, killing two, reported AFP. A local official said that 15 insurgents attacked a convoy--part of a long-running, decades-long fight between communists and the Philippine government.
Soldiers were deployed to Tacloban and other cities to quell rampant looting.
“Our mission is to help the police of Tacloban because they are also victims. We all know the government is down. We came here to help the government,” Manila police officer Julian Bagawayan was quoted as saying. “We are here to stop people looting properties and breaking into homes.”
The relief effort to bring food, water, clothing, and other necessities to central Philippine islands mostly started on Monday, reported The Associated Press. The news agency reported that bloated bodies are seen floating in the the water, unaccounted for.
Two officials on Sunday said the typhoon may have killed as many as 10,000 people, but it is unclear if that many died. The official death toll remained well below that at around
President Benigno Aquino III said that it was likely 2,500 people died, while the the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said that officially, 1,833 have died.
Several countries, like the U.S. and the U.K., have sent ships but aid workers say efforts are too slow.
“The mobilization of air assets, clearing away the debris, opening up the routes - this is a top priority,” John Ging, who heads operations at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told the BBC. “It’s happening. It’s happening too slowly, but it’s happening and everybody is working flat out to make it better.”
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Josh Morgerman, a storm chaser, described the devastation and said the situation was “desperate.”
Tacloban City, he wrote on Facebook, “is a horrid landscape of smashed buildings and completely defoliated trees, with widespread looting and unclaimed bodies decaying in the open air. The typhoon moved fast and didn’t last long– only a few hours– but it struck the city with absolutely terrifying ferocity.”
“At the height of the storm, as the wind rose to a scream, as windows exploded and as our solid-concrete downtown hotel trembled from the impact of flying debris, as pictures blew off the walls and as children became hysterical, a tremendous storm surge swept the entire downtown.”
He continued: “The city has no communication with the outside world. The hospitals are overflowing with the critically injured. The surrounding communities are mowed down. After a bleak night in a hot, pitch-black, trashed hotel, James, Mark, and I managed to get out of the city on a military chopper and get to Cebu via a C-130– sitting next to corpses in body bags. Meteorologically, Super Typhoon HAIYAN was fascinating; from a human-interest standpoint, it was utterly ghastly. It’s been difficult to process.”
There have been reports of bodies in the streets in Tacloban, as the city doesn’t have enough body bags to contain them all.
There is no electricity, supplies, or food in some of the more typhoon-ravaged areas, officials said.
“People here were convinced that it looked like a tsunami,” mayor Alfred Romualdez told CNN. “I have not spoken to anyone who has not lost someone, a relative close to them. We are looking for as many as we can,” he said.
And Tacloban city administrator Tecson Lim told the news agency that the death toll in the city alone “could go up to 10,000.” Lim said around 300 or 400 bodies were removed from Tacloban, and a mass burial was planned in Palo town, located nearby.
Roxas said he viewed the damage of Tacloban from a helicopter.
“From a helicopter, you can see the extent of devastation. From the shore and moving a kilometer inland, there are no structures standing. It was like a tsunami,” he told ABS-CBN.
Earlier, the Red Cross gave an estimate that around 1,200 were killed.
“An estimated more than 1,000 bodies were seen floating in Tacloban as reported by our Red Cross teams,” Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the agency, told Reuters. “In Samar, about 200 deaths. Validation is ongoing.”
Other Red Cross officials, however, said that it was unlikely there were 10,000 deaths in Tacloban alone.
The airport in Tacloban, a city of 200,000 located about 580 kilometers (360 miles) southeast of Manila, looked like a muddy wasteland of debris Saturday, with crumpled tin roofs and upturned cars. The airport tower’s glass windows were shattered, and air force helicopters were busy flying in and out at the start of relief operations.
Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin said President Benigno Aquino III was “speechless” when he told him of the devastation the typhoon had wrought in Tacloban.
“I told him all systems are down,” Gazmin said. “There is no power, no water, nothing. People are desperate. They’re looting.”
According to CNN, the storm surge that flooded Tacloban was 40 to 50 feet high.
According to reports, the storm is considered one of the most powerful on record to ever make landfall.
As the form hit Tacloban, Social media users uploaded videos of howling winds and streets that were heavily flooded. The storm also ripped roofs of buildings.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement that America “stands ready to help.”
At the request of the Philippine government, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel directed U.S. Pacific Command to deploy ships and aircraft to support search-and-rescue operations and airlift emergency supplies, according to a statement released by the Defense Department press office.
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The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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