Workers Still Collecting the Dead in Tacloban

Updated Nov. 25, 2013 12:24 p.m. ET

Typhoon survivors and volunteers began a massive clean up in typhoon-ravaged Tacloban city Monday. Associated Press

TACLOBAN, Philippines—Recovery teams in this city hammered by Typhoon Haiyan are still pulling dozens of corpses a day out of rubble and off roads, burying some in temporary shallow graves to await grieving relatives.
“We don’t bury them deep, and leave markers on where they are buried so families can later come and identify them,” said Officer Rey Paular, from Surigao City in Mindanao, who is part of the third wave coming in from his city to help find the dead.
More than two weeks after the storm made landfall, the process of identifying and counting the dead remains a headache for authorities.

Haiyan: Anatony of a Disaster
How a Catastrophe Unfolded: As Typhoon Haiyan approached Tacloban, officials rushed to prepare for one of the most powerful storms ever recorded. But their efforts, it turned out, were woefully inadequate.
Timeline and Map

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Recovery teams and cleanup crews located 57 bodies on Sunday and 36 on Saturday, said Pablito D. Cordeta, senior superintendent and regional director of the Bureau of Fire Protection.
“I think within one or two weeks we should be able to complete the operation,” he said.
The number of bodies being found is falling, from 70 to 80 a day to around 60 a day, said Tim Walsh, an environmental consultant working with the United Nations Development Programme on cleanup efforts. He expects the official death toll to grow substantially as remains are identified by family members. The government doesn’t include unidentified bodies in the official count.
The latest official death toll is 5,235, with 1,725 from Tacloban. But the actual total dead from the typhoon may never be known. As recently as 2012, remains were found in Aceh, Indonesia, from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed roughly 170,000 people, he said.
Haiyan—which hit Nov. 8 and was the deadliest typhoon known in Philippine modern recorded history—destroyed farmland and businesses that accounted for 2.2% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to a report released Monday by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
That led the bank to downgrade growth estimates for the Philippine economy to 6.9% from 7.1%, based on higher-than-anticipated reconstruction costs.
The Eastern Visayas, the province hardest pummeled by the typhoon, produces 11% of the country’s coconuts and 6% of its rice. The loss of most of the island’s coconut and rice production will help drive up food prices by 3%, according to J.P. Morgan.
The search for bodies in Tacloban has yet to expand into surrounding areas.
Roughly half the bodies there were found under a 10-foot-tall mountain of rubble that lines the city’s shoreline, where sea levels rose 20 feet.
Mr. Cordeta has sent teams to the coastline to “help find victims from the debris using their senses—the smell and their eyes.”
“Yesterday, they found the bodies of two children and an old man,” said April Alcobar who receives 500 pesos, or about $11, a day to clear rubble from destroyed neighborhoods along the coastline from the Tzu Chi Foundation, a Taiwanese charity. “The smell was horrible. It reminded me of dead rats.”
The Tzu Chi Foundation is employing 6,000 Filipinos until Dec. 24. The workers form long human trains carting out small baskets of rubble from neighborhoods that were once home to 20,000 families. The region is now a 10-foot-tall pile of concrete boulders, twisted metal and rotting wood.
Former residents worked to clear the debris that was once their homes on Monday.
Michelle Ignacio used to own a convenience store while her husband worked as a van driver but now gets by carrying out buckets of rubble.
“Before we only smelled the sea, and everything was clean. There were palm trees along the street,” she said. Now, only a few skeletal buildings remain, and workers have tied handkerchiefs around their face to shield themselves from the odor of bodies and acrid smoke from trash fires.
“Now it’s gone, everything’s gone,” she said.
Food has slowly begun to arrive in to areas affected by the typhoon, and some restaurants have begun to sell roast chicken and pork at roadside stalls. But many survivors have little money to spend.
On Monday, a crowd of young men eagerly smashed open a public telephone box in an effort to get at the change inside. When they finally pried open the change slot, muddy one-peso coins cascaded to the ground.
When asked what they would buy, one yelled, “Cigarettes!”
“No, only rice, it’s now 60 pesos a kilogram,” said one of the men.

Link: Workers Still Collecting the Dead in Tacloban