By Jon Donnison
In Tacloban, the survivors are living among the dead. Driving into
town we saw dozens of bodies rotting by the roadside. Three days after
the typhoon struck, there was nobody to bury them. People in the
streets are covering their faces with handkerchiefs to try and mask
the stench.
Many are searching for loved ones who are still missing. With all
phone lines down there’s no way of knowing other than to go out and
try and find them.
In the centre of town barely a single building is left standing. The
streets reduced to a mess of twisted debris.
A wall of water hit this city. The scenes are reminiscent of the Asian
Tsunami of 2004 and of Japan in 2011.
The city’s battered airport is now the hub of the aid operation. But
at the moment it’s simply not getting here fast enough.
Airport birth: At the airport’s gates, hundreds of people gathered
this morning, desperate to get their hands on any aid they could.
“We are so very hungry and thirsty,” one woman told me with tears in
her eyes. She said she was sleeping by the roadside after her house
was flattened.
Next to the airport’s control tower we heard screams of pain where a
makeshift hospital has been set up. Many of the injured are being
treated without anaesthetics. A man in his thirties twists in agony as
medics work on a huge bloody gash to his left leg.
In a room next door a woman has just given birth laid out among the
debris. She tells us her newborn daughter is named Baja Joy. Born into
a world upturned.
Next to her another young woman is also in labour. “Push Push,” says
the doctor, clasping her hand.
In what’s left of the airport’s terminal, hundreds of people are
lining up desperate to get out of Tacloban on any plane they can.
“This is my dad’s only chance for life,” Peter Minoc tells me as he
pushes his wheelchair-bound 86-year-old father Filamon towards a
military cargo plane. “He needs dialysis and he’s been off now for two
days. He’s in a critical condition.”
With communications down, many people here are also desperate to let
relatives know they are alive.
Liliane Cortez tells us she survived the typhoon by clinging to a
concrete post as storm water rushed through her house. “The rain
lashed on my face felt like needles,” she says. Now she’s desperate to
let her father Norberta Balsera know that she managed to survive.
A few kilometres from the airport we run into the country’s Interior
Secretary Mar Roxas who hands on out in the streets directing traffic.
“Go, go, go” he cries, urging the gridlocked traffic to creep through
the debris.
But the devastation here is overwhelming and there’s little sign so
far that the government is managing to get aid out to the many in
need.
So people are doing whatever they can to help themselves. In the
centre of town people are clambering over the wreckage of what used to
be a supermarket, carrying whatever they can.
Those who have nothing are looking for anything they can find. And
unless more relief comes quickly, the little food there is will run
out soon. – BBC News
