Yolanda would make its second landfall in Tacloban (Pop’n as of May 2010: 221,174) Friday morning. From a military cargo plane, CNN’s Paula Hancocks was among the first journalists to see the catastrophe in Tacloban on Saturday. “It looks as though a tsunami swept through here,” she said by satellite phone.
The airport terminal was “completely destroyed,” and shell-shocked Filipinos were gathering around the airport with the anticipation that the military was bringing food, water and medicine, Hancocks said. Officials told her that the water surge reached the second story of structures... Every tree was flattened or snapped in half, and the timber landed on roads, blocking transportation, she said. “You assume as you go inland you’ll find more people who are injured or who have lost their lives,” Hancocks said. From the plane, she said, “you could see a lot of groundwater on the land itself, and pretty much every single tree was damaged.
“That showed the sheer force of the surge and the wind,” she said. “On the ocean front, you can see the defenses were damaged.” Residents waded through waist-high water in the streets Saturday. Vehicles were turned over or piled on one another. Fallen utility poles were in the middle of roads. [i]From an initial 100 bodies seen at the airport, more bodies would be uncovered in the subsequent days, and the body count would increase.
In the heart of the city, one of the three American storm chasers billeted at the Hotel Alejandro, Josh Morgerman, wrote in more graphic terms. “The city is a horrid landscape of smashed buildings and completely defoliated trees, with widespread looting and unclaimed bodies decaying in the open air. The typhoon moved fast and didn't last long-- only a few hours-- but it struck the city with absolutely terrifying ferocity. At the height of the storm, as the wind rose to a scream, as windows exploded and as our solid-concrete downtown hotel trembled from the impact of flying debris, as pictures blew off the walls and as children became hysterical, a tremendous storm surge swept the entire downtown. Waterfront blocks were reduced to heaps of rubble.”
The group had to save some guests who were trapped in the rooms on the ground floor of Hotel Alejandro as the flood waters rose, some of them screaming for help. A few had to smash the windows of their rooms to keep themselves from drowning. Some had to be carried on mattresses that floated on the water and brought to the second floor. The city lost communication with the world outside. Hospitals overflowed with the critically injured. The surrounding communities were mowed down. After spending a “bleak night in a hot, pitch-black, trashed hotel,” the storm chasers managed to hitch a ride on a C-130 plane to Cebu – “sitting next to corpses in body bags.”[ii]
Georgina Bulasa, whose house was also in the heart of the city, told Discovery Channel that their house shook and looked like the wind was going to uproot it. Then the water came suddenly, and her children cried and panicked. Everything was floating like paper - the refrigerator, the divider, the flat screen TV, everything. Because of the water, many people died. She could not imagine that she would survive the flood. All her neighbors perished, entire families, she said. For Georgina and her family, there was only one way to survive: swim for it. Luckily, a neighbour, whose gate was opened, generously took them in after they swam from their devastated home.
At the Sto. Niño Parish convent, which was just more than a hundred meters from the shore, Fr. Villamil was alarmed when the windows were destroyed and the strong winds were blowing with an eerie sound. “Mist was everywhere and it was all white,” the priest narrated. “There was nowhere to take refuge in. Upstairs, the roof was gone. Downstairs water was rising fast. It was either the water or the wind. It’s almost like the devil and the deep blue sea,” he said.
.
“People faced an agonizing dilemma. Rising water floods at the ground floor, but with terrifying winds tearing roofs apart, escaping to an upper floor is far from a safe option. Every typhoon brings flooding. But the deluge brought by Haiyaan, is on a scale of a tsunami. The storm surge simply seeps away weak buildings. In the worst areas, flood water is 20 feet deep,” the Discovery narrator said. The water was easily two storeys deep, the footages showed.[iii]
Mons. Ramon Aguilos, a priest stationed at the Our Lady of Lourdes parish in the V & G subdivision (Pop’n as of May 2010: 5,473), a middleclass residential area in uptown Tacloban, started his ‘Yolanda watch’ as early as 4:00 AM when he was awakened by strong winds blowing outside the window of his room. At this time, the storm was about to make landfall in Guiuan, some 144 kilometers away. When he peeked outside, his driver was repositioning his car in the garage where he thought it would be safer. Aguilos, his fellow priest and altar boys would huddle together in the living room, thinking it was the safest place in the rectory.
By 6:00, the mobile phones lost signal. Connection to his parishioners and to the world outside was severed. By then water had started flooding the rectory, reaching knee-deep, and the doors were being forced open by furious winds. The southern side overlooking the street was already open. The roof had in the meantime given way to the heavy downpour. Then a crashing sound. The wall of the garage had collapsed and fell to the car’s frontage, causing a major damage. This he would later discover. The walls of the parish conference room also gave way, falling flat on the floor, and parts of the ceiling were falling down. Even the iron grills of their fence were being twisted and disfigured.
“The wind had its own peculiar sound –deadening, eerie, howling, ghoulish... I probably got wrapped up watching out for any possible strong force of wind to batter the weaker parts of the rectory’s structure, or for the tree in front of us to fall down that I failed to see the rooftops of our neighbors’ houses blown away, the electric posts torn down, fallen trees and other sights of destruction,” Aguilos wrote.[iv]
(Continue here)
[i] “Preliminary Update of Super Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) Devastation,” Saturday, November 9, 2013 4:54
[ii] https://www.facebook.com/iCyclone
[iii] “The Inside story of typhoon Haiyan,” Discovery Channel
[iv] Aguilos, Mons. Ramon, “Super-Typhoon Yolanda: A Story of Pain and Hope,” A paper delivered on February 4, 2014 during the CEAP Superintendents' Commission Mid-Year Assembly in Forest Lodge, Camp John Hay, Baguio City
No comments:
Post a Comment