Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez himself barely survived the typhoon. An hour before Yolanda hit Tacloban, he got a call from one of his men stationed at an island east of the San Jose peninsula (Pop’n as of May 2010: 15,733), facing the Pacific Ocean. The man was alarmed because the shore was being emptied of its water, like it was being sucked away from the shore by some unknown force. Romualdez did not know what to make of it; neither did any of his men. He was able to confirm the phenomenon when he went to Patio Victoria, the family-owned resort at San Jose. Indeed, the water had receded.
The next call came from his wife Christina who told him she and their kids were at their old residence near the airport, a danger zone. She was supposed to be in downtown Tacloban in a safer place. He said he was tempted to scold her for putting themselves in danger but held himself back because she might attempt to take the car and proceed to downtown. Instead he told her to brace herself and secure the children because this was going to be a “very, very powerful typhoon.”
He got a third call. But before he could answer it, the glass in the ballroom broke and exploded. “It was so powerful. It became very dark. So we couldn’t get out anymore,“ he recalled. Then he was pulled inside the room, but seven of his men ran off. Suddenly the door burst open with water just rushing in from all over. So they were forced to go up the ceiling and, through it, to the roof. He estimated that was about 20 to 24 feet high. “The whole roof was shaking. We felt the waves were pounding on the roof. As we were there, one after the other pieces of the roof were flying. That’s when I looked up and I saw there was no more land. Everything was water,” the mayor said.[i]
In all likelihood, San Jose’s population of more than 15,000 had similar experiences as their mayor, swimming in the angry waters and clutching to floating debris for dear life, some of them surviving, but many of them losing against nature’s fury and swallowed up by the waves. Entire families disappeared, and everybody lost a kin or two or more, their homes destroyed and everything else gone.
Coming to the site 11 days later, Canadian Doug Nienhuis observed: “The land had been swept clean of human habitation in places as if a giant scraper had come down and scraped it flat. I have no idea how this type of damage could have occurred. Were the winds that powerful? Had the storm surge been moving at a great enough speed to do this? It just defied common sense…. I saw again one vast area in particular that had been swept clean. It was on the side facing the ocean where the typhoon and storm surge would have hit first. The houses there all had concrete foundations and concrete walls. These were not the flimsy wooden huts of the shantytowns around Tacloban. Yet, it made no difference. These hundreds of concrete homes had been flattened and torn to pieces just as if they were made of wood. This begs the question of what did this. The wind was powerful, but I don’t think it could have done that kind of damage. Could it have? And my sense was that the flood consisted of simply rising water. And rising water would not have done that kind of damage. It would have had to have been water on the move, like a tsunami.”[ii]
At the Tacloban airport, another story was unfolding. Located at the south eastern tip of the San Jose Peninsula, it was home to a detachment of Air Force soldiers headed by Lieutenant Colonel Fermin Carangan. He was the commanding officer of Tactical Operations Group 8, a unit of the Philippine Air Force providing air support in Samar and Leyte based in Tacloban. They had positioned themselves at the airport, thinking they would later take off in rescue missions with the airport as their base of operations. They did not expect the deluge coming from the nearby sea.
By 7:00 that morning, rains came in downpours together with the strong winds. Then the unexpected sea came in, rising fast, that Carangan and his men, two of them new graduates of the Philippine Military Academy, had to destroy the ceiling so they could go to the roof. But the building collapsed after it was buffeted by the strong current, and they were soon swallowed by the swirling waters. Carangan clung to a piece of wood as he was swept by the waves and current and carried to the sea. His men drifted somewhere else.
(Continue here)
[i] Romualdez, Tacloban City Mayor Alfred, Philippine Senate hearing, GMA videotape
[ii] Nienhuis, Doug, “The Cycling Canadian Super-Typhoon Yolanda,” http://www.thecyclingcanadian.com/day-eleven-super-typhoon-yolanda/
[iii] Mangosing, Frances, “Air Force officer recounts 6-hour ordeal at sea with young boy at height of Yolanda,” INQUIRER.net, 9:05 pm, Monday, November 11th, 2013
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