Rescuers in the central Philippines counted hundreds of dead bodies and feared that many more were injured on Saturday, a day after one of the most powerful typhoons on record ripped through the region, wiping away buildings and levelling seaside homes with massive storm surges.
More than 1,000 people are believed to have died in just Tacloban, the provincial capital of leyte, some 580 km south-east of here. “We now fear that thousands will have lost their lives. An estimated more than 1,000 bodies were seen floating in Tacloban as reported by our Red Cross teams. In Samar, about 200 deaths. Validation is ongoing,” Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross was quoted as saying by media reports.
With communications and roads still cut off, Captain John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority, said he had received “reliable information” by radio from his staff that more than 100 bodies were lying in the streets of the city of Tacloban on hardest-hit leyte Island. It was one of six islands that Typhoon Haiyan slammed into on Friday.
Regional military commander lt-General Roy Deveraturda said that the casualty figure “probably will increase,” after viewing aerial photographs of the widespread devastation caused by the typhoon, which was heading toward Vietnam after moving away from the Philippines. Cabinet Secretary Rene Almendras, a senior aide to President Benigno Aquino III, said that the number of casualties could not be immediately determined, but that the figure was probably in the range given by Andrews.
Government troops were helping recover bodies, he said. Civil aviation authorities in Tacloban, a city of 200,000 located about 580 kilometres southeast of Manila, reported that the seaside airport terminal was “ruined” by storm surges, Andrews said.