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Aid Groups in Philippines Fear Finding More Devastation Mayor of Typhoon-Ravaged City Urges Residents to Flee
(35 minutes later)
CEBU, the Philippines — International aid groups and foreign governments began ramping up their relief efforts in the Philippines on Wednesday, confronting daunting obstacles in areas where the scale of the devastation remains unknown five days after Typhoon Haiyan unleashed its fury. TACLOBAN, the Philippines — The mayor of this typhoon-ravaged city urged residents on Wednesday afternoon to flee to other cities and find shelter there with relatives if they could, saying that the local authorities were struggling to provide enough food and water and faced difficulties in maintaining law and order.
While the focus of relief efforts has been on Tacloban, a city of about 220,000, aid groups and government officials fear harder-to-reach areas have suffered devastation of similar intensity, albeit on a smaller scale. The appeal from Mayor Alfred S. Romualdez came as the first attempt in Tacloban to conduct a mass burial ended in failure. A police convoy of trucks carrying more than 200 rotting corpses turned back after hearing gunshots as they approached the city limits.
Just assessing the extent of the damage is still a challenge, said Nick Finney, the Asia humanitarian director for the charity Save the Children. His group is focusing on providing basic materials like plastic to build emergency shelters and equipment to produce and store clean water. Covered with black plastic tarpaulins, the bodies were returned to a gathering place at the foot of the hill topped by City Hall, where they released a powerful odor.
“We’ve got a lot of people without the basics and it is quite a confusing picture,” Mr. Finney said. “We don’t have good information outside cities. It might be as bad or worse in rural areas, but they’re quite spread out and it will take a long time to build up the full picture.” Mayor Romualdez said that the city desperately needed trucks and drivers to distribute relief shipments of food that are piling up at the city’s airport, as well as more trucks, heavy equipment and personnel to pull decaying corpses out of the unending mounds of debris and collapsed houses that stretch across this city.
With the U.S.S. George Washington carrier group nearing the Philippines to help in the relief effort, the American military was already on the ground in Tacloban, installing equipment at the airport Wednesday so that relief and other planes could land at night. The U.S. was also using eight C-130 cargo planes to deliver aid. “I have to decide at every meeting which is more important, relief goods or picking up cadavers,” he said.
The Philippines’ remoteness has hampered the disaster response. While delivery of aid to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake involved a short trip from the United States, getting material into the Philippines requires flights from more distant locations like Australia, Singapore and Dubai. Mr. Romualdez denied persistent rumors of gunfights among the increasingly hungry and thirsty population, saying that business owners and others were only firing warning shots. “That’s why sometimes you hear gunshots, but it is to ward off looting,” he said.
The slow response is potentially perilous for people with serious injuries sustained in the storm Friday. Some of the injured in Tacloban have been able to get flown out on military aircraft, but in outlying towns they may not be getting timely medical attention. He did not offer any municipal assistance to those seeking to leave the city, noting that the city had virtually no working vehicles. The local fleet of light buses and group taxis in Tacloban, a city of 220,000 before the typhoon, was destroyed by the storm surge. The United States and the Philippines have been offering some seats on planes leaving after dropping off relief supplies.
“The emergency health care window — it’s closing rapidly,” said Dr. Thomas Kirsch, director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who is consulting with some aid groups in the Philippines. “You can only survive for so long with significant injuries. The need to get in with critical health care supplies is paramount.” Jerry Sambo Yaokasin, the second-ranking official in the municipal government, said in an interview that Philippine soldiers and police officers may be stretched too thin to provide security in Tacloban even as they try to reach other coastal communities to assess damage. He suggested that foreign forces may be needed, including to provide security for gas stations to reopen.
“When you consider the logistics involved of bringing food to hundreds of thousands of people with no immediate airport, it’s not something you fix overnight,” Dr. Kirsch said. “You have to put in perspective the severe nature of the event. This isn’t another little storm. This is a true catastrophe.” “If the United States will come in, if it will be allowed to come, or if the United Nations can come in, it will really help us secure the city,” he said.
The tensions over the food shortages had deadly consequences Tuesday when thousands of people stormed a rice warehouse, leading to the collapse of a wall and killing eight people in the Leyte Province city of n Alangalang, officials said. The Philippines is a former Spanish possession and then was an American possession, and any suggestion that it needs to rely on foreign forces can be an emotional issue here. Mr. Romualdez disagreed with Mr. Yaokasin on the need for security forces from outside the Philippines, saying that, “right now, that won’t be necessary.”
The typhoon on Friday came as the government of the Philippines has been working to improve its response to disasters. The Philippines has one of the world’s most heavily armed civilian populations, few effective gun control regulations and a tradition of violence being used in personal disputes, legacies of being an American possession before World War II.
“The government has been, over the past three or four years, trying to up its game,” said Steven Rood, the Asia Foundation’s country representative to the Philippines. Service station owners are refusing to start pumping fuel from their underground storage tanks for fear that they will be robbed by desperate people, Mr. Yaokasin and Mr. Romualdez each said separately. The result has been the virtually complete disappearance of gasoline and diesel at any price, immobilizing aid vehicles and private cars alike. Scavengers have already combed over the large numbers of vehicles crushed, overturned or otherwise damaged during the typhoon, siphoning fuel from them.
Part of that effort has been a focus on releasing disaster funds more quickly and responding more rapidly to looming threats. Ample gasoline and diesel reserves remain in the city, but officials must find a way to provide security for their distribution, Mr. Yoakasin said. He added that the shortage of vehicles and fuel had become so acute that he no longer had a car himself and had to hitch rides to move around the city.
“Preparations for this typhoon were in fact one step ahead of previous typhoons,” Mr. Rood said. “This is the first time we had a storm surge prediction. But people did not expect a storm surge like that, so they didn’t know how to respond.” Valerie Amos, the United Nations undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs, held a public meeting with Mr. Romualdez at a building next to City Hall and promised international assistance. But she said that the United Nations desperately needed service stations to open in order to operate trucks here.
Some of the problems in Tacloban were caused by the disappearance of the local government because of the magnitude of the storm’s destruction. “We have to have fuel, so we have to have some kind of refueling center,” she said.
“Something like 90 percent of the police disappeared because they were dealing with their own family calamities,” Mr. Rood said. Mr. Romualdez told her that the city could not easily cope with the influx of aid workers, as practically no vehicles or fuel is available to bring them in from the airport, while food and drinking water are running out. “I’m asking those who come here, ‘please be self-sufficient, because there’s nothing,'” he said.
Under Philippine law, provinces have strong autonomy and have first responsibility for disaster response. It is rare for the national government to step in to take over some local government functions, as it did after Typhoon Haiyan, Mr. Rood said. “I don’t recall it happening before in terms of national disasters,” he said. Typhoon Haiyan did not just destroy the electricity grid here. The storm surge, when the sea level rose by as much as 13 feet in minutes, inundated and disabled most of the generators in the city, Mr. Yoakasin said, and the lack of fuel has limited operations for the ones that are left.
Furthermore, there is a strong patriotic streak in the Philippines, particularly in the military, so they tend to hold a tight rein on disaster response. But the country is also open to outside aid, particularly if it is seen as augmenting the work of the government, Mr. Rood said. Large numbers of grocery store owners died when the sea rose as much as 13 feet during the storm, disabling much of the capacity of the private sector to bring in food. Because grocery stores have been heavily looted and continue to be looted, surviving store owners are refusing to bring in new inventory and reopen their stores, Mr. Yaokasin said.
“There is that strain of pride and nationalism, but so far as I’ve seen it hasn’t gotten in the way,” he said. “The police visibility has to be there to the point that businesses feel the security to open their businesses,” he said.
One concern of aid groups has been that the Philippine government has been trying to play down the extent of the devastation and loss of life. On Tuesday, President Benigno S. Aquino III put the death toll from the typhoon at 2,000 to 2,500 people, dismissing estimates that as many as 10,000 may have died in Tacloban alone. On Wednesday the government’s official death toll hit 2,275 people. The city has been slower to dig mass graves than outlying villages that also suffered heavy loss of life in the typhoon, because Tacloban neighborhoods have strongly resisted them, fearing that they might cause disease. Dr. Emmanuel M. Bueno, a director from the Philippines Department of Health, said that bodies would be disposed of safely, by laying them side by side in layers and putting sheets of tarpaulin sprinkled with lime in between each layer.
The Red Cross gave a preliminary estimate that 22,000 people had been reported missing by their families, some of whom may yet turn up. Local and national health officials agreed on Tuesday night to dig three mass graves just for Tacloban, Dr. Bueno said in an interview on Wednesday morning. “We are going to bury them in a mass grave so that decomposition will not be on view by the local residents,” he said. “We will give them at least a decent burial, with a blessing by a priest.”
Food is in such short supply that even government officials have little to eat. Dr. Bueno said that he was unable to get any food on Tuesday, and only had some coconut milk on Wednesday. Conditions are worse here for outsiders than during the Haiti earthquake in 2010, he said, adding that he had participated in the relief effort there.
“Rescuers there of course had food to eat and portable water,” he said. The tropical heat here was sweltering on Wednesday, increasing the need for water, after briefly cooler weather on Tuesday followed torrential rains early that morning.
The true death toll here is a mystery. The Philippine government put the official death toll from the typhoon at 2,275. Few deaths have been confirmed in Tacloban because local officials say they are only counting bodies that they have collected or formally recorded, and have at least tried to identify.
But Mr. Yaokasin said that the leader of a single Tacloban neighborhood of 4,000 people had notified him that 1,000 residents had died.
Jennifer Cicco, the Leyte Island administrator of the Philippines Red Cross, said that thousands of people were also missing and were presumed to have been swept out to sea and drowned. Arie Levy, the president of Sauveteurs Sans Frontieres, a French non-profit group, said that he had visited a village a mile beyond the city limits of Tacloban on Wednesday morning and estimated that there were roughly 1,000 bodies visible there.
Disease is the next concern. Mr. Levy said that his group had run through its entire supply of 700 tetanus vaccines from France in just two days, as crowds of people with lacerations from the typhoon or its aftermath had lined up for injections. Many streets here are so clogged with debris that even pedestrians must walk carefully over piles of boards and other construction materials with protruding nails.
Many children have begun showing up at the group’s field hospital with fevers and diarrhea as well, probably from drinking contaminated water, he said, adding that, “The situation is just catastrophic.”

Austin Ramzy reported from Cebu and Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong.

Austin Ramzy reported from Cebu and Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong.