Fear Philippines officials; Vietnam evacuates 600,000; China on high alert
The death toll from a super typhoon that decimated entire towns in the Philippines could soar well over 10,000, authorities warned yesterday, making it the country’s worst recorded natural disaster.
The horrifying estimates came as rescue workers appeared overwhelmed in their efforts to help countless survivors of Super Typhoon Haiyan, which sent tsunami-like waves and merciless winds rampaging across a huge chunk of the archipelago on Friday.
Hundred of police and soldiers were deployed to contain looters in Tacloban, the devastated provincial capital of Leyte, while the United States announced it had responded to a Philippine government appeal and would send military help.
“Tacloban is totally destroyed. Some people are losing their minds from hunger or from losing their families,” high school teacher Andrew Pomeda, 36, told AFP, as he warned of the increasing desperation of survivors.
“People are becoming violent. They are looting business establishments, the malls, just to find food, rice and milk… I am afraid that in one week, people will be killing from hunger.”
Authorities were struggling to even understand the sheer magnitude of the disaster, let alone react to it, with the regional police chief for Leyte saying 10,000 people were believed to have died in that province alone.
“We had a meeting last night with the governor and, based on the government’s estimates, initially there are 10,000 casualties (dead),” Chief Superintendent Elmer Soria told reporters in Tacloban.
“About 70 to 80 percent of the houses and structures along the typhoon’s path were destroyed.”
On the neighbouring island of Samar, a local disaster chief said 300 people were killed in the small town of Basey.
He added another 2,000 were missing there and elsewhere on Samar, which was one of the first areas to be hit when Haiyan swept in from the Pacific Ocean with maximum sustained winds of 315 kilometres an hour.
Dozens more people were confirmed killed in other flattened towns and cities across a 600-kilometre stretch of islands through the central Philippines.
Meanwhile, More than 600,000 people were evacuated as super typhoon Haiyan bore down on Vietnam, authorities said yesterday.
Residents of the Vietnamese capital Hanoi were braced for heavy rains and flooding, while tens of thousands of people in coastal areas were ordered to take shelter ahead of Haiyan’s expected landfall tomorrow morning.
“We have evacuated more than 174,000 households, which is equivalent to more than 600,000 people,” an official report by Vietnam’s flood and storm control department said.
The storm is now expected to strike tomorrow morning after changing course, prompting further mass evacuations of some 52,000 people in northern provinces by the coast, the VNExpress news site reported.
China also announced its highest alert for Typhoon Haiyan as six crew members of a cargo boat were reported missing yesterday.
The China Meteorological Administration hoisted the “red” signal, the highest in its four-tier warning system, as the typhoon brushed the southern island province of Hainan.
Six people were lost at sea after the mooring rope of their vessel was cut in the storm, causing the ship to drift, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The Philippines endures a seemingly never-ending pattern of deadly typhoons, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other natural disasters.
This is because it is located along a typhoon belt and the so-called Ring of Fire, a vast Pacific Ocean region where many of Earth’s earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur.
However, if the feared death toll of above 10,000 is correct, Haiyan would be the deadliest natural disaster ever recorded in the Philippines.
The previous deadliest disaster in the Philippines occurred in 1976, when a tsunami triggered by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated the Moro Gulf on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, killing between 5,000 and 8,000 people.
Source: The Daily Star
