By Alyssa Kim
Edgar Su/Reuters
On the Ground in Tacloban: The Times's Keith Bradsher reports on the devastation in Tacloban, Philippines, three days after Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the city.
TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Decomposing bodies still lie along the roads, like a corpse in a pink, short-sleeve shirt and blue shorts facedown in a black, muddy puddle 100 yards from the airport. Just down the road is a church that was supposed to be an evacuation center but is littered with the bodies of those who drowned inside.
When a wind-whipped ocean rose Friday night, the ground floors of homes hundreds of yards inland were submerged within minutes, trapping residents like Virginia Basinang, a 54-year-old retired teacher, who suddenly found herself struggling in waist-deep water on the second floor of her home. Screaming people bobbed in the water that surged through the streets, many grabbing for floating debris.
"Some of them were able to hold on, some were lucky and lived, but most did not," she said, adding that 14 bodies were left on a wall across the street when the seawater receded a half-hour later. The bodies are still there, and the odor of their decay makes it impossible for Ms. Basinang and her family to eat meals at home.
Typhoon Haiyan, among the most powerful in history, slammed into the eastern Philippine city of Tacloban on Friday and cut a path of devastation barreling west across the archipelago nation. In its wake, corpses lay along roads lined with splintered homes and toppled power lines, as the living struggled to survive, increasingly desperate for fresh drinking water, food and shelter. The damage to everything is so great that it is hard even to tally. Mass graves began to fill as relief efforts struggled to get underway.
The roads of this once-thriving city of 220,000 were so clogged with debris from nearby buildings that they were barely discernible. The civilian airport terminal has shattered walls and gaping holes in the roof where steel beams protrude, twisted and torn by winds far more powerful than those of Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall near New Orleans in 2005.
One of the saddest and deadliest moments came when hundreds of people flocked to Tacloban's domed sports arena at the urging of municipal officials, who believed its sturdy roof would withstand the wind. The roof did, but the arena flooded, and many inside drowned or were trampled in a frenzied rush to higher seats.
The top civil defense official of the Philippines said in an interview after inspecting the damage that the storm surge had been the highest in the country's modern history. Nothing like this had ever happened, perhaps explaining why so few thought they needed to flee inland and instead went to evacuation centers near the coast. The sea level rose 10 to 13 feet and filled streets and homes deep in the city, propelled by sustained winds of at least 140 miles per hour and gusts that were much stronger.
"It was a tsunami-like storm surge; it is the first time," said Eduardo del Rosario, the executive director of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. Tacloban has been hit by typhoons for decades, but never had the sea risen high enough to pour over the swath of low salt marshes and inundate the city's shady streets, he said.
As a violet sunset melted on Monday evening into the nearly total darkness of a city without electricity, lighted only by a waxing half-moon, some dispirited residents walked home. Others lay down in the ruins of the airport terminal after another day of waiting in hope of fresh water, food or a flight out. Grocery stores and pharmacies across the city were sacked over the weekend, leaving bare shelves for a population quickly growing hungry and thirsty.
A coast guardsman said that he had helped fill a mass grave in the nearby village of Hernani. "I personally threw in one body earlier, and it was a relative of my friend in Manila — I haven't told her yet because I can't get a signal" for cellphone usage, said the coast guardsman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. The same friend in Manila has lost her grandfather, whom the coast guardsman threw in the mass grave, as well as her aunt and two cousins, the guardsman added, saying that other relatives who survived the typhoon had confirmed the identities of the dead.
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