Typhoon Haiyan Slams Philippines

Nov. 9, 2013 11:29 a.m. ETMANILA—Philippine President Benigno Aquino III said Saturday that the death toll from supertyphoon Haiyan will be “substantially more” than officials have so far confirmed, a grim prediction as eyewitnesses reported bodies being pulled from rubble in one town where cars and trees had been tossed about.
Speaking at a televised news conference, the president declined to answer questions seeking an estimate of the number of people who had been killed.

Rescue workers carry a woman about to give birth at a makeshift medical center at the Tacloban airport Saturday. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The confirmed count is four, but one city—Tacloban, which has 220,000 residents—was hit especially hard, and one government official said at least 100 were dead. The Philippine National Red Cross said Saturday it received reports suggesting around 1,000 people died in Tacloban and about 200 in neighboring Samar province.
“It is only an estimate from the field, not validated,” said Philippine Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang.
A Hong Kong-based cameraman and storm chaser who has been filming typhoons for nine years reported seeing dead bodies and looting in Tacloban.

Tacloban city, in Leyte province, central Philippines Saturday. Associated Press

“There are people pulling bodies out of the rubble, basically,” said James Reynolds from Cebu on Saturday.
Mr. Reynolds said he saw people looting drugstores and electronics stores.
“It’s a lawless situation,” he said. “It’s only going to get worse because people are going to get hungrier or thirstier, and there’s not enough aid getting in.”
Supertyphoon Haiyan, which had the strength of a Category 5 hurricane, is headed to Vietnam, where it is expected to make landfall in the morning.
The typhoon hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippines on Friday, with its heavy rain and winds uprooting trees, shredding homes, and causing five-yard high storm surges that flooded coastal towns.
“The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of the United Nations Disaster Assessment Coordination team.
“This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumble weeds, and the streets are strewn with debris ,” he said, adding that relief efforts will be challenging because roads between the airport and the central city were “completely blocked.” The U.N. team arrived in Tacloban on Saturday.
Eyewitnesses reported in local media having seen dead bodies in the streets of Tacloban and washed up on beaches.
Capt. John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, said it appeared that the number of deaths in Tacloban alone were at least 100.
Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground, said the cyclone was the strongest to make landfall in recorded history.
“Haiyan had winds of 190-to-195 mph at landfall [in the Philippines], making it the strongest tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in world history,” he said.
But Philippine weather watchers said that while Haiyan was unusually powerful, there have been more powerful storms in the Southeast Asian country.
Haiyan, locally known as Yolanda, made landfall in the province of Eastern Samar at dawn Friday and quickly swept to the neighboring province of Leyte, whose capital is Tacloban City. It battered other islands and provinces through early Saturday.
Floods caused by heavy rains and storm surges left a trail of devastation in Tacloban. Video footage showed cars piled on top of one another, houses leveled to the ground, and residents wading in knee-deep waters.
The typhoon weakened after entering the South China Sea, but still remained fierce, with wind speeds of up to 101 miles an hour (163 kilometers an hour), according to the Vietnam National Center for Hydro-Meteorology Forecasting.
The forecasting center said the typhoon would make landfall along Vietnam’s central coast Sunday morning at around 10 a.m. local time and then move along the coast.
Mr. Aquino said the priority is to restore power and communications in devastated areas of the Philippines, as well as to attend to the needs of victims. He said the government has sufficient funds to respond, but that the international community is offering help.
Israel said it could send rescue teams, while New Zealand will send mobile hospitals.
Mr. Aquino didn’t address how many people may have died. “We are not prepared to say how much more at this point in time because that also is being collated at this time,” he said.
Philippine Health Secretary Enrique Ona said in a radio interview that he had sent 100 cadaver bags to Tacloban.
—Vu Trong Khanh in Hanoi and Te-Ping Chen in Hong Kong contributed to this article.
Write to Cris Larano at cris.larano@wsj.com

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