The rusting white truck began its grim journey shortly after 10.30am in the increasing heat of a tropical day.
Negotiating its way over a tangle of rubble, timber and fallen power cables, it passed groups of bystanders who gaped, covering their noses with T-shirts or outspread hands as they viewed its sorry cargo.
On board, guarded by rifle-toting Philippine army troops, were 34 decomposing corpses. Until last Friday they were residents of the bustling city of Tacloban, alive until the storm came.
The white truck and small entourage of vehicles formed a funeral procession for a mass burial – the first of what promises to be many.
But 15 minutes along a highway littered with the remains of a city, a gunshot rang out and the military convoy came to a sudden halt.
Petrified soldiers leapt to the road and sprinted for cover in the glass-strewn lobby of an empty building. Locals melted into the fields and shacks beyond.
The troops had no doubts as to the culprit for the suspected attack. “New People’s Army,” they muttered, referring to a shadowy communist rebel group said to operate in some corners of the Filipino countryside.
As they returned to their vehicles and raced back to the city centre, rifles and handguns trained on the blur of collapsed buildings around them, it became clear that there would be no mass burials that day.
The incident, witnessed by The Telegraph on Wednesday morning, underlined the immense challenges facing government officials and aid workers as they battle to piece Tacloban back together again.
Five days after disaster struck, the bodies continue to pile up on street corners, roundabouts and at local morgues. The security situation appears to be deteriorating, with nerves stretched among locals and military and rumours spreading of the NPA’s involvement in a spate of violent crimes in the city’s under-curfew downtown area.
The funeral procession had set out from the Tacloban City Pasalubong [Souvenir] Centre, a palm-lined compound that was once a leading local tourist attraction selling postcards and handicrafts.
Since the weekend, the seaside shopping centre has been transformed into an improvised open-air morgue where corpses are stored in advance of the mass burials. The bodies have not stopped arriving.
On Wednesday inside its gates, almost 200 bodies were splayed out beneath black “Department of Health” body bags, putrefying in the scorching heat.
On one open-topped truck, dozens more were stacked, their bodily fluids seeping down the vehicle’s bodywork before forming a potent rust-coloured puddle on the ground.
Senior Supt Emmanuel Aranas, the forensic officer co-ordinating Tacloban’s burials, said many more victims would arrive over the coming days and weeks. Thousands are believed to have died here. “We are expecting more bodies,” he said. “Right now we have 111 [over there] and 74 [here]. The 74 are Monday. The 111 are Tuesday. It’s difficult to know when it will stop. We’ve been here for two or three days already, and we are still finding cadavers.”
Mr Aranas said the health risk from so many unclaimed dead was minimal and insisted that the situation was coming under control.
But a five-minute stroll through the grotesque, corpse-strewn wasteland that is now Tacloban gives the lie to that claim.
Even now, scores of bodies continue to litter the city’s streets, abandoned by desperate relatives or total strangers outside churches, government buildings or on the patio of an abandoned petrol station.
“At midnight, the people bring the bodies here,” sighed Renato Metran, the 56-year-old deacon of the Iglesia Ni Cristo church.
Here dozens of bloated and often faceless corpses form what might be a protective circle around a statue of Saint Joseph, their hands, feet and bellies distorted. “There are so many dead,” said Mr Metran, staring out at the ghoulish scene.
Black body bags also line each side of the city’s main thoroughfare — the National Highway – with names or partial names scrawled on to white labels in washed-out orange ink.
“Maria Gutierez,” read one such tag. “Connie (torso),” stated another. A third, in capitals, said: “RONALYN CANETE & BABY!”
Inside the office of a collapsed Shell petrol station that has become a notorious disposal site for the dead, a woman’s intricately manicured feet poked out from beneath a blue and white sheet. Beside her, the right leg of an infant, perhaps aged three or four, could also be seen.
The child’s body had been covered with a red and white windscreen shade that read: “Improve Performance. Whatever you drive.”
Some are making a good business out of Tacloban’s tragedy.
At the Cebu Rolling Hills funeral parlour, bosses have given their fleet of four battered black Mercedes hatchbacks the task of cleaning up the city’s streets — something the city’s shattered government has so far failed to achieve.
Gerson Jandoc, a company security guard who has now turned his hand to corpse collecting, said demand was so great that the company was running out of materials.
“We have many, many bodies. I wanted to help,” the 29-year-old said to explain his recent career change. “The problem is we don’t have any more body bags.”
Mr Jandoc had already hauled six bodies into his hearse by 9am on Wednesday morning and taken them off to the funeral parlour.
His third mission of the day was to remove the body of 70-year-old Marina Cortez from the roadside and prepare her horribly mutilated corpse for burial.
“If you have to wait for the army it will take too long. It is up to us to make our move,” said Nelson Javier, 44, the woman’s nephew, who had paid 53,000 pesos (£740) for the service. He stood and watched as Mr Jandoc and a colleague pulled Ms Cortez’s remains on to a stretcher before wrapping her in white plastic, securing her body in place with green tape and finally slotting her into the car’s rear.
But for some survivors, it is still too early to think about burials.
Handwritten signs appealing for information about missing loved ones have been pasted on to many homes beside placards warning off looters.
Five days after the disaster, Mark Philip, a local fisherman, was still scouring the wreckage of his family home for the body of his eight-year-old son, Mark Anthony. “I lost my son,” he said.
“We haven’t find him yet. “I was trying to save my son but [a piece of] timber hit my head. I lost my son to the water.”
Asked if the police or government were helping, he shook his head. “We haven’t seen any of the bodies moved yet.”
Back at the tourist centre-turned-morgue, Mr Aranas reassured reporters that the mass burials would begin and Tacloban’s “stink” would soon be gone.
But that was before the white truck left and before the shooting began.
When the funeral convoy returned to the centre with its cargo intact, new bodies had appeared alongside the iron fence of the morgue – soon to be counted and added to the already terrible number.
Armando Belo Surrao, 48, whose girlfriend had lost her father to the typhoon, surveyed Tacloban’s increasingly nightmarish landscape. “It’s like being in a movie only with the smell and the taste and the [special] effects,” he said. “It is surreal.”
Thursday 14 November 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/philippines/10447057/Typhoon-Haiyan-Taclobans-convoy-of-the-dead-is-turned-back-as-the-bodies-pile-up.html
