From single digits the day after, to about 1,200 the following day, to “at least 10,000 in one city alone” Sunday: The jump in the official estimates of the total number of persons feared dead because of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” has been completely unnerving. By all accounts, Yolanda (international code name: Haiyan) is now considered the most destructive natural calamity ever in the country’s history.
But as horrifying as its multiple landfalls last Friday were (the roar of the wind described as like a jet engine’s up close, the storm surges said to be “as tall as trees”), the worst is yet to come: digging out the thousands of bodies from under debris and inside waterlogged homes. It would be impossible to imagine the suffering of the survivors, as they search for their missing kin and find family and friends among the many dead.
The unprecedented scale of the devastation, its outline becoming clearer by the day, suggests that President Aquino’s initial and instinctive description of Tacloban City’s alleged lack of preparation was at best premature. The fact that Tacloban was among the hardest hit does not necessarily mean that the city was inadequately prepared; it could also mean that, given the force of the
typhoon and the strength and speed of the storm surges, no preparation could have been sufficient.
The real factors behind the terrible loss of life must be determined; the tentative estimate of 10,000 dead, from city and police officials, is a staggering five percent of the city’s population and demands a strict accounting. But that will come in due time.
For now and the next several days, the main task is to quickly create the conditions that will allow government, private and international donor resources to effect rescue and relief operations in all affected areas, not just Tacloban.
It is good to note that the airport in Tacloban, with its control tower and terminal severely damaged, has managed to receive an almost regular schedule of airlifts; that the road traffic from Luzon to Leyte’s capital has
reopened; that police Special Action Forces have been deployed to the city to prevent more looting. But so much more needs to be done.
One example, out of many. The tourist town of Coron, in Palawan, the last landmass Yolanda barrelled through on its harrowing way to the South China Sea, suffered massively; according to its mayor, as much as three-fourths of the municipality’s houses and buildings sustained considerable damage, while the airport’s control tower and terminal were destroyed. Thousands of evacuees and foreign visitors are stranded, with the town’s source of potable water fast running out.
We can expect more of this in the next couple of days; as communication links are reestablished, we may finally hear from other areas, suffering severe damage and in serious need of urgent assistance. The breakdown in communications, total in some instances, has deepened the typhoon-induced shock; not knowing whether family and friends have even survived Yolanda is a source of trauma in itself. That all power transmission lines in the provinces of Leyte and Samar are still down, while parts of five other provinces remain without electricity, can only add to the difficulty.
Aside from the many things that need to be done, then, we would like to emphasize the vital importance of rebuilding communication lines. The vulnerability of the entire system can be explained in part by the country’s wholehearted embrace of and dependence on mobile telephone services. But the cell sites that now dot the country are as easy to knock down as they are easy to build. We add our voice to those appealing to the country’s telecommunications companies to get their cell sites in the affected areas operating once again.
It is good to note that the Department of Social Welfare and Development has set up a satellite Internet facility in Tacloban, to allow dazed residents to comfort anxious relatives elsewhere in the country or abroad. But that’s just in one city; about a million people in several provinces suffer the same fate.
Going forward, it seems clear that we need to build
additional redundancy into our communications system, by including more robust communications facilities. But for now, we need to get those signal bars up and running.