How One Town Avoided Calamity

Updated Nov. 14, 2013 1:59 p.m. ET

Survivors crowd around a Philippines Air Force C-130 military aircraft in Tacloban on Thursday, hoping to get on the next flight. Associated Press

GUIUAN, Philippines—The scene from above this beach town looks like the aftermath of a bombing.
Outside the town that Filipinos had hoped to develop into a surfer’s paradise, miles of smashed coconut trees roll up a beach that now looks more like a garbage dump. Heaps of mangled concrete, wood and steel line every street. The only vehicles moving are motorbikes, with three-wheeled auto rickshaws and cars mostly idle for lack of fuel. People queue for hours in long lines for food, fuel and to make a free, one-minute satellite call to relatives.

Although more aid is arriving in Tacloban, the number of people streaming into the city searching for loved ones is complicating the relief effort. The WSJ’s James Hookway gives us a first-hand account from the ground.

And yet Guiuan, which is situated on the southeastern tip of Samar Island, where Typhoon Haiyan made landfall a week ago, has in some ways been lucky.
“I can’t explain it,” said U.S. Navy Capt. Russell Hays, a medical officer who arrived recently. It surprises me because of the ferocity of the storm. Given the devastation, I would have anticipated a fatality rate approaching 10%.”
As the Philippines starts to dig out from the devastation wrought by Haiyan, a process that aid agencies say will take years, many of this town’s residents are homeless, but most are alive—thanks largely to the mayor who bullied them to survival.
In a town of 45,000 people, 87 died. Town figures show 23 missing and 931 injured. The official death toll for the country rose Thursday to 2,357 people. More than 800,000 were displaced.

Before and After Typhoon Haiyan

Left: Digital Globe/Google; Right: Digital Globe/Getty Images

Christopher Gonzalez, 33 years old, was unbending in getting people, blasé about big storms, to evacuation shelters as rains and howling winds from Haiyan pummeled the coastline at this end-of-the-earth place. The evacuation centers dot the town and include the public gym, churches and schools—buildings constructed of concrete rather than the flimsier cinder blocks and wood of most homes.
“I forced the people to evacuate because this time was different,” Mr. Gonzalez said in an interview in the heavily damaged town hall. “It’s very hard to convince people to evacuate, because they are used to typhoons here.”
The mayor and other town officials said that Haiyan, which was one of the strongest storms to make landfall anywhere on record, wasn’t just a normal typhoon but a “delubyo,” a local word that approximately means “armageddon.”
Even some of the town’s strongest buildings weren’t able to withstand the force of the typhoon, known in the Philippines as Yolanda. Most of those who died were crushed when some centers, like the gym, collapsed. The force of the storm was so strong that the mayor’s car was lifted off the ground and slammed into a wall of a nearby building.
At the airport, several hundred people mill around hoping to get on a military relief flight out. In the town, the roofs of most buildings have been completely torn away or are badly shredded. Trucks and buses sit overturned near the town center.
In the first two days after the storm, most of the town’s shops were looted. Security stabilized as the Philippine military started flying in aid earlier this week. By Thursday, three flights a day were arriving.
Across the most devastated parts of the central Philippines, survivors continued Thursday to search for ways to get to larger cities such as Manila and Cebu. Regional cities such as Tacloban, northwest of Guiuan on Leyte Island, were so badly hit that local authorities can’t feed their own homeless, much less an influx of refugees.

Typhoon Hits Philippines

Survivors walked under a fallen electric post Sunday. Reuters

Three things came together to make Supertyphoon Haiyan so devastating. We take a quick look at what those were on The Foreign Bureau, WSJ’s global news update. (Photo: AP)

In Tanauan, a town of 50,000 people on Leyte, some people are striving to rebuild their homes. But many more are leaving town by foot and tricycle for the provincial capital of Tacloban, where they hope to obtain places aboard Philippine and U.S. Army helicopters and transport planes to take them out of the wasteland.
“We have to flee this place,” said Nestor Nataba, 56 years old. “Even the priest from that church has fled to Manila already.” He motioned to an orange Catholic church, its glass windows blown out. Behind it, on the edge of the town’s plaza, was a freshly dug mass grave filled with the typhoon’s victims.
For days, hundreds of people have thronged into Tacloban, seeking refuge and supplies. But shortages abound.
“How many days has it been since the typhoon? Six? We still haven’t received any water or food,” said Lizbeth Ocampo, 58, squatting in the remains of a home that had been stripped bare.
Tacloban’s mayor, Alfred Romualdez, said many bodies still lie where they died, due to lack of manpower to clear them.

The Tacloban airport was besieged by people trying to leave. Local authorities in Leyte have asked refugees to fill in handwritten forms asking to be airlifted out. More than 1,000 people in one area have done so, but authorities don’t have the capacity to take everyone. The process was a show of officialdom.
“We feel it’s something that gives them hope,” Chat Ortega, a local government official, said of the forms. At the town’s municipal center, residents painstakingly traced out letters copied from a sheet of paper pasted above on the wall that reads: “TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT _______ ARE VICTIMS OF TYPHOON YOLANDA. THAT SAID PERSONS WANT TO AVAIL FREE TRANSPORT FOR _________.” In the corner, city officials signed their names to the handmade appeals.
The U.S. is using C-130 transport planes to ferry victims from Tacloban to Manila. The number of U.S. troops helping relief efforts is expected to triple to 1,000 by the weekend.
Japan, meanwhile, is preparing what could be the largest deployment by its Self-Defense Forces for disaster aid, reflecting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s determination to boost his nation’s presence in the region, which is prone to natural disasters and is rife with geopolitical tensions.
Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said the Japanese government is preparing to send as many as 1,000 troops for emergency relief work to typhoon-hit areas.
“We are supplying aid in rapid succession to rescue the people of the Philippines from the enormous typhoon damage,” Mr. Abe said.
Since assuming office last December, Mr. Abe has worked to strengthen relationships in Southeast Asia as several nations, including the Philippines and Vietnam, face increasingly assertive claims by China over the resource-rich South China Sea.
A Japanese defense ministry spokesman said 50 SDF troops have already arrived in the Philippines. The SDF is also preparing to send three warships, as well as a transport aircraft and helicopters.
The Philippine government said Thursday that all roads and bridges that were impassable have been opened, helping badly needed supplies move into towns.
Authorities confirmed Thursday that a senior police officer who said last week the storm could have claimed 10,000 lives—an estimate even President Benigno Aquino III said was too high—has been replaced.

Henry Medalle, 65 years old, sat in front the wreckage of his house in Guiuan on Thursday. Many of the town’s residents are homeless after Typhoon Haiyan, but most are alive. Paul Baylis/Wall Street Journal

A national police spokesman said Chief Superintendent Elmer Soria was removed as head of the regional office that oversees police operations in the central Philippines. Attempts to reach Mr. Soria, who remains with the force, weren’t successful.
The typhoon could shave up to 0.8 percentage point off economic growth, Arsenio Balisacan, secretary of economic planning, said in an interview. The economy would likely expand by between 6.5% and 7% this year, he added.
Agricultural produce has been devastated by the typhoon.
Some 3 million coconut trees have been damaged, said Euclides Forbes, chief of the Philippine Coconut Authority.
—Deborah Kan in Hong Kong contributed to this article.
Write to Paul Baylis at paul.baylis@wsj.com and Te-Ping Chen at te-ping.chen@wsj.com

See the article here: How One Town Avoided Calamity