Survivors wait to board a C-130 military plane out of Tacloban City yesterday.
TACLOBAN: Gunfire forced the cancellation of a mass burial in the typhoon-ravaged Philippines yesterday as authorities struggled to dispose of the dead, while anger among survivors at the slow trickle of aid turned deadly.
Thousands of people jostled and begged for seats on scarce flights out of the ruined city of Tacloban, where putrefying corpses compounded a growing health menace after one of the strongest storms on record killed thousands.
Attempts to bury some of the victims of Super Typhoon Haiyan suffered a setback when gunshots halted a convoy travelling towards a communal grave.
“We had finished digging the mass burial site. We had the truck loaded with bodies... but... there was some shooting,” Tacloban mayor Alfred Romualdez said. “They could not proceed.”
Adding to the grim body count, news emerged that eight people were crushed to death Tuesday when a huge crowd of survivors from the typhoon rushed a government rice store.
“One wall of our warehouses collapsed and eight people were crushed and killed instantly,” the National Food Authority’s Rex Estoperez said of the incident in Alangalang town, 17 kilometres (10 miles) from Tacloban.
Five days after Haiyan ripped apart entire coastal communities, the situation in Leyte’s provincial capital Tacloban was becoming ever direr with essential supplies low and increasingly desperate survivors clamouring to leave.
“Everyone is panicking,” Captain Emily Chang, a navy doctor, said.
“They say there is no food, no water. They want to get of here,” she added, saying doctors at the airport had run out of medicine, including antibiotics.
“We are examining everyone but there’s little we can do until more medical supplies arrive.”
The World Health Organization said there were significant injuries that needed to be dealt with, even as medics worked to prevent outbreaks of diseases caused by cramped living conditions and dirty drinking water.
It cautioned regular health needs also had to be met, including the 12,000 babies expected to be born this month to the more than 11.3 million people affected.
The United Nations estimates 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban alone, where five-metre (16-foot) waves flattened nearly everything in their path as they swept hundreds of metres across the low-lying land. However, Philippine President Benigno Aquino said late Tuesday he believed that number was “too much”, adding that 2,500 “is the figure we’re working on”, despite the rapidly climbing toll and the bodies still littering the streets of Tacloban.
Yesterday, UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos refused to be drawn on the differing estimates.
“We are focusing on the living not the dead,” she said.
“We are not busy counting bodies but are focusing on supporting those who survived and act accordingly.”
Cabinet Secretary Rene Almendras admitted authorities had been overwhelmed by the sheer number of corpses.
“The reason the body recovery stopped is because we ran out of body bags,” he said. “But we now have 4,000 bags. I am not saying the casualties are 4,000. We are making sure there is an oversupply.”
At Tacloban airport, journalists witnessed exhausted and famished survivors pushing and shoving each other to get on one of the few flights out of the city.
Philippines Airlines said it was lying on six planes a day, each with 75 seats.
“We have been here for three days and we still cannot get to fly out,” said a frail Angeline Conchas, who was waiting for space on a plane with her seven-year-old daughter Rogiel Ann after fleeing their building as flood waters rose around it.
“We made it out, but now we may die from hunger.”
Overwhelmed and under-resourced rescue workers have been unable to provide food, water, medicines, shelter and other relief supplies to some of the 673,000 made homeless, and desperation has been growing across the disaster zones.
AFP
