Updated Nov. 15, 2013 12:21 p.m. ET
Seven days after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, there's still confusion over how many people were killed in the disaster. The WSJ's Enda Curran gives us an update and says the people of Tacloban are struggling in bad conditions.
MANILA—The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines in decades kept climbing Friday, as officials struggled with two-mile long traffic jams and bottlenecks at port to get food, fuel and other supplies to the worst-hit islands of Samar and Leyte.
Hundreds of typhoon survivors waited for the first evacuation flight of the day at the airport in Tacloban on Friday. AP
A woman walked along a devastated area in Tacloban City on Thursday. Getty Images
The official fatality count from Typhoon Haiyan has risen to 3,621, according to Eduardo del Rosario, chief of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
Authorities said they would work to validate hundreds more deaths that the U.N. had reported based on what it said were government tallies. Officials in Manila said those deaths had not been fully verified with an actual body count.
Mr. del Rosario said agency staff were going to village leaders and funeral parlors to double check if the deaths reported to were accurate, but that the task was complicated if victims were buried in mass graves.
"If we just rely on the figures that they give us and we don't validate on the ground, then we would have a figure higher than the 3,621 that we have now," Mr. del Rosario said. "We really have to validate, so that, more or less, we are closer to the truth."
President Benigno Aquino III added to the confusion about the death toll when he said on television Tuesday that earlier projections from local officials of a death toll reaching 10,000 were the result of the "emotional trauma." But his own estimate of 2,000 or 2,500 has already been surpassed.
In Tacloban, a city of 220,000 that is the capital of Leyte province, cadavers were still laid out like cordwood at the side of the road in some areas as authorities tried to speed up mass burials.
"We do not have the manpower any more" to pick the corpses up," Mayor Alfred Romualdez said on Friday. He estimated that up to 40% of the city's population has left since the typhoon struck.
But he also said that food trucks from Manila had begun arriving, a development that is likely to sharply improve morale among emotionally shattered residents. The city "is starting to come back," he said.
Already, there were signs of an improvement in the quality of life. Vendors began selling grilled meat at roadside stalls and wandering cigarette-sellers began touting their wares. At the airport, the number of military flights sharply increased after U.S. forces enabled the battered facility to handle nighttime flights.
"Every flag you can imagine is represented" in the relief missions being flown in to Tacloban, said Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy, commander of the U.S. task force.
Some U.S. military officers say privately that they are confused about who is really running the snowballing aid operation: the national government, local leaders or the growing ranks of aid agencies now on the ground in Leyte and Samar islands, which lay straight in the typhoon's path.
The president's spokesman Herminio Coloma said Mr. Aquino is planning to return to Tacloban city on Sunday after creating a new umbrella agency to oversee the aid effort.
Relief aid is being flown or trucked in to Leyte and neighboring Samar. In addition to the Tacloban airport, relief flights are landing at the airstrip in Guiuan in Eastern Samar province, unloading supplies and picking up storm victims desperate to get out.
But the ground route has proved challenging. Under normal circumstances, trucks would take about 18 hours to haul goods from Manila to Leyte and Samar, via road and ferry. But ferry service is less than half what it was before the typhoon—down to about 11 roundtrips a day.
"We were experiencing bottlenecks at the port of Matnog," said Mr. del Rosario, referring to the closest port on the main island of Luzon to Samar. "Ferry owners were delaying their trips because they don't have enough passengers and cargo on the way back."
Mr. del Rosario said the situation is starting to ease.
Aside from trucks filled with relief goods and cars with relief workers, gasoline tankers are also among those caught in the traffic jams.
Gasoline is a precious commodity on the stricken islands, not just to fuel vehicles but to feed portable power generators. Typhoon Haiyan knocked down transmission towers and power lines that delivered electricity produced in Leyte's rich geothermal fields to Samar, Cebu, Negros and even Luzon.
Around 9 million people have been affected by Haiyan, with nearly 1.5 million displaced by the strongest typhoon to ravage the country in two decades.
Mr. Aquino has been urging volunteers to pack 140,000 bags of relief goods a day, each of which is enough to sustain a family of five for up to three days. On Thursday, Mr. Aquino visited five government relief centers in the capital to rally volunteers.
Many Tacloban residents are still trying to leave, worried about further delays in the supply of water and food. Streets were in many places quiet and emptied, a marked contrast to the normal crush.
"People can't do anything constructive if there are no stores open," Mayor Romualdez said. "People want to fix their houses. They'll wait until it comes back to normal and then they come back."
Elsewhere in the city, as the sun beat down Friday, dozens of volunteers fanned out, mopping floors and distributing relief. Blue-uniformed officials cleared debris.
Seated near City Hall on a lone chair wearing a yellow T-shirt, a bright dot amid a ruined coffee shop whose hanging glass-lantern fixtures had miraculously stayed intact, Ronnel Advincula, 32, was among those pledging to stay.
"I have no plan to escape because I love this place," said Mr. Advincula, who works as a hospital janitor. A former rice farmer, he said his life has improved tremendously since coming to Tacloban six years ago, something he feels grateful for.
Mr. Advincula has yet to receive any government relief—he has been relying on handouts from private charities. But he says he is willing to stay as long as it takes for the city to rebound, which he thinks could take easily a year or more.
"The people here are so friendly," he says. "Though now maybe not as much, because everyone is hungry."
One resident who decided to leave was Grace Blanco. Of the six members of their family living in her family home, she was the only one to survive. Carrying a pair of bags filled with her few remaining possessions, she managed to snag a place on one of the U.S. Marine C-130 transport planes ferrying survivors out to Manila.
"I'm all alone, the only one left," Ms. Blanco, 24 years old, said as she sat cross-legged on the floor of cargo plane, squeezed up with her fellow passengers. "I have a cousin in Novaliches," she said, referring to an impoverished neighborhood in the capital. "But I've not been there before. I'm not sure what to do or where to go."
—Enda Curran and Te-Ping Chen contributed to this article.
Write to Cris Larano at [email protected] and James Hookway at [email protected]
Seven days after Typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines, there's still confusion over how many people were killed in the disaster. The WSJ's Enda Curran gives us an update and says the people of Tacloban are struggling in bad conditions.
MANILA—The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines in decades kept climbing Friday, as officials struggled with two-mile long traffic jams and bottlenecks at port to get food, fuel and other supplies to the worst-hit islands of Samar and Leyte.
Hundreds of typhoon survivors waited for the first evacuation flight of the day at the airport in Tacloban on Friday. AP
A woman walked along a devastated area in Tacloban City on Thursday. Getty Images
The official fatality count from Typhoon Haiyan has risen to 3,621, according to Eduardo del Rosario, chief of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
Authorities said they would work to validate hundreds more deaths that the U.N. had reported based on what it said were government tallies. Officials in Manila said those deaths had not been fully verified with an actual body count.
Mr. del Rosario said agency staff were going to village leaders and funeral parlors to double check if the deaths reported to were accurate, but that the task was complicated if victims were buried in mass graves.
"If we just rely on the figures that they give us and we don't validate on the ground, then we would have a figure higher than the 3,621 that we have now," Mr. del Rosario said. "We really have to validate, so that, more or less, we are closer to the truth."
President Benigno Aquino III added to the confusion about the death toll when he said on television Tuesday that earlier projections from local officials of a death toll reaching 10,000 were the result of the "emotional trauma." But his own estimate of 2,000 or 2,500 has already been surpassed.
In Tacloban, a city of 220,000 that is the capital of Leyte province, cadavers were still laid out like cordwood at the side of the road in some areas as authorities tried to speed up mass burials.
"We do not have the manpower any more" to pick the corpses up," Mayor Alfred Romualdez said on Friday. He estimated that up to 40% of the city's population has left since the typhoon struck.
But he also said that food trucks from Manila had begun arriving, a development that is likely to sharply improve morale among emotionally shattered residents. The city "is starting to come back," he said.
Already, there were signs of an improvement in the quality of life. Vendors began selling grilled meat at roadside stalls and wandering cigarette-sellers began touting their wares. At the airport, the number of military flights sharply increased after U.S. forces enabled the battered facility to handle nighttime flights.
"Every flag you can imagine is represented" in the relief missions being flown in to Tacloban, said Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy, commander of the U.S. task force.
Some U.S. military officers say privately that they are confused about who is really running the snowballing aid operation: the national government, local leaders or the growing ranks of aid agencies now on the ground in Leyte and Samar islands, which lay straight in the typhoon's path.
The president's spokesman Herminio Coloma said Mr. Aquino is planning to return to Tacloban city on Sunday after creating a new umbrella agency to oversee the aid effort.
Relief aid is being flown or trucked in to Leyte and neighboring Samar. In addition to the Tacloban airport, relief flights are landing at the airstrip in Guiuan in Eastern Samar province, unloading supplies and picking up storm victims desperate to get out.
But the ground route has proved challenging. Under normal circumstances, trucks would take about 18 hours to haul goods from Manila to Leyte and Samar, via road and ferry. But ferry service is less than half what it was before the typhoon—down to about 11 roundtrips a day.
"We were experiencing bottlenecks at the port of Matnog," said Mr. del Rosario, referring to the closest port on the main island of Luzon to Samar. "Ferry owners were delaying their trips because they don't have enough passengers and cargo on the way back."
Mr. del Rosario said the situation is starting to ease.
Aside from trucks filled with relief goods and cars with relief workers, gasoline tankers are also among those caught in the traffic jams.
Gasoline is a precious commodity on the stricken islands, not just to fuel vehicles but to feed portable power generators. Typhoon Haiyan knocked down transmission towers and power lines that delivered electricity produced in Leyte's rich geothermal fields to Samar, Cebu, Negros and even Luzon.
Around 9 million people have been affected by Haiyan, with nearly 1.5 million displaced by the strongest typhoon to ravage the country in two decades.
Mr. Aquino has been urging volunteers to pack 140,000 bags of relief goods a day, each of which is enough to sustain a family of five for up to three days. On Thursday, Mr. Aquino visited five government relief centers in the capital to rally volunteers.
Many Tacloban residents are still trying to leave, worried about further delays in the supply of water and food. Streets were in many places quiet and emptied, a marked contrast to the normal crush.
"People can't do anything constructive if there are no stores open," Mayor Romualdez said. "People want to fix their houses. They'll wait until it comes back to normal and then they come back."
Elsewhere in the city, as the sun beat down Friday, dozens of volunteers fanned out, mopping floors and distributing relief. Blue-uniformed officials cleared debris.
Seated near City Hall on a lone chair wearing a yellow T-shirt, a bright dot amid a ruined coffee shop whose hanging glass-lantern fixtures had miraculously stayed intact, Ronnel Advincula, 32, was among those pledging to stay.
"I have no plan to escape because I love this place," said Mr. Advincula, who works as a hospital janitor. A former rice farmer, he said his life has improved tremendously since coming to Tacloban six years ago, something he feels grateful for.
Mr. Advincula has yet to receive any government relief—he has been relying on handouts from private charities. But he says he is willing to stay as long as it takes for the city to rebound, which he thinks could take easily a year or more.
"The people here are so friendly," he says. "Though now maybe not as much, because everyone is hungry."
One resident who decided to leave was Grace Blanco. Of the six members of their family living in her family home, she was the only one to survive. Carrying a pair of bags filled with her few remaining possessions, she managed to snag a place on one of the U.S. Marine C-130 transport planes ferrying survivors out to Manila.
"I'm all alone, the only one left," Ms. Blanco, 24 years old, said as she sat cross-legged on the floor of cargo plane, squeezed up with her fellow passengers. "I have a cousin in Novaliches," she said, referring to an impoverished neighborhood in the capital. "But I've not been there before. I'm not sure what to do or where to go."
—Enda Curran and Te-Ping Chen contributed to this article.
Write to Cris Larano at [email protected] and James Hookway at [email protected]