Rescuers race to reach cut-off communities with many missing from Typhoon Haiyan

Rescue workers in the Philippines were on Monday engaged in a desperate struggle to reach areas devastated by 'Super' Typhoon Haiyan, amid fears the estimated death toll of 10,000 people could rise even further.

Even in a country inured to natural disasters, the sheer scale of the destruction wrought by ‘Super’ Typhoon Haiyan has left everyone from the estimated 9.5 million people affected by the storm, to the government and aid agencies, reeling in shock.

“Absolute bedlam” is how the Chairman of the Philippines Red Cross Richard Gordon described the situation in Tacloban City. The worst-hit area so far reached, Tacloban is where the majority of the 10,000 people believed killed are thought to have perished.

“There are an awful lot of dead people all over the place,” said Mr Gordon.

Three days after Haiyan sent tsunami-like, five metre-high waves crashing into Tacloban, destroying virtually every building in the city, corpses of both people and animals litter the streets.

Food, water and medicine are in desperately short supply and shocked survivors wander the city begging for food and water from anyone who might have it.

As the stench of rotting, bloated bodies floats through the air, the chances of disease spreading through the city’s surviving population increase by the hour.

The International Red Cross said the figure of 10,000 deaths is “realistic”. Now, the Philippines media is calling Haiyan the worst disaster to have ever hit their country of more than seven thousand separate islands.

Widespread looting and disorder in Tacloban, as starving and homeless people search for food and water, has only added to the difficulties being experienced by the authorities and aid agencies.

“The unstable security situation is a clear indication of the desperation on the ground,” Marie Madamba-Nunez, Oxfam’s spokesperson in Manila, told the Telegraph. “There have been reports of people attacking relief convoys and even helicopters are not being spared.”

With so many remote communities still cut-off from the outside world, there are real fears that the final death toll will be far higher.

Only now are the first relief teams arriving in eastern Samar province, the first place in the central Philippines to experience the full force of Haiyan’s fearsome winds and raging floods.

Estimates of the dead on Samar are already in the hundreds and thousands more are missing.

“Access has been very difficult and it’s only today that we have managed to get a team into Borongan in eastern Samar. A helicopter was able to land them,” said Mrs Madamba-Nunez.

But the coastal town of Guiuan, where Haiyan first made landfall on Friday, remains completely isolated.

Aerial footage has revealed that much of the town of 40,000 people has been flattened, raising the grim prospect that the number of dead there may match that of the destroyed city of Tacloban.

“The roads are completely impassable and there is no contact with the town, so I believe the navy will have to try and reach Guiuan,” said Mrs Madamba-Nunez.

Other severely-affected areas in the Visayas island group to the west of Tacloban and Samar are also still unreached.

“We’re still unable to get through to Roxas City. The water on the roads is hip-high and electrical posts and trees are across all the roads,” Kendra Clegg, one of a four-person UN disaster and assessment team on Panay Island in the Visayas, told the Telegraph.

The mood of the survivors too, is becoming darker. “Some people are complaining about the lack of supplies,” said Ms Clegg. “People are definitely more sullen than they were yesterday.”

Over 630,000 people have been displaced by Haiyan, and are camping out in makeshift evacuation centres, or simply sleeping in the open.

“98 per cent of the houses are destroyed in parts of northern Cebu Island, but the main problem is the lack of water,” said Tata Abella, an Oxfam worker in the town of Daanbantayan on Cebu’s far northern tip.

“People are drinking from secondary sources like wells, but these are not really safe so there’s a real risk of people falling ill.”

More than anything, the huge calamity in Tacloban means that far fewer resources are reaching the other regions devastated by Haiyan.

“The destruction in Tacloban is appalling,” said the UN’s Ms Clegg, “but it’s overshadowing the other places that were hit by the typhoon.”

Monday 11 November 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/10440265/Rescuers-race-to-reach-cut-off-communities-with-tens-of-thousands-still-missing-from-Typhoon-Haiyan.html