Caring for refugees

The trickle of refugees from areas in the Visayas hit hard by Supertyphoon “Yolanda” has turned into a stream; many of them fled their town or city without making provision, or indeed without the capacity to make provision, for new lodging. An admirable citizen-led effort to transport those refugees arriving in Cebu or Metro Manila with relatives to run to has been a source of real help in a difficult transition. But there are also refugees who have no place to go to or stay in. We must all help find a way to shelter them, even if only temporarily.

It is good to note that the government of Pasay City is considering putting up temporary “tent cities,” to house the growing number of typhoon-displaced persons disembarking at the airports the city hosts. “We want to accommodate the evacuees coming from the Visayas and reduce the number of those crowding the airports here,” Pasay city administrator Dennis Bernard Acorda said the other day.

But his city may be able to accommodate only “80 families or 400 individuals.” That is not nearly enough—and the scale of the problem in Cebu City, a short flight from Tacloban City, must be several multiples higher. Indeed, as the raw numbers will tell us, the problem of dealing adequately, humanely and effectively with Yolanda’s refugees has the potential to turn, quickly, into a crisis.

Consider that the most recent situation report of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) available before this page went to press (report number 24, dated Nov. 17 at 6 a.m.) records the number of displaced persons at over 3.9 million. Only 349,000, or less than 10 percent of what is still a slowly increasing total, are housed in evacuation centers (of which there are 1,530 in all). This means that almost 3.6 million persons displaced by Yolanda are located outside evacuation centers. The longer it takes for conditions in their areas to stabilize, for relief operations to turn into rehabilitation, the more the displaced residents will decide to leave Palo or Ormoc or Leyte or Guiuan and start over in another place.

Here is another way of looking at the enormous scale of the problem. The NDRRMC report counts the total number of houses which sustained either partial or total damage at 543,000; more than half, or 272,087 houses, were completely destroyed. Those are astonishing numbers, but in fact the report is still incomplete.

The first images of entire districts in Tacloban City destroyed by Yolanda have been seared into the national imagination. But the NDRRMC tally for the city shows that only 382 have been reported as totally damaged—and that total first entered the NDRRMC’s situation reports the first Sunday after the storm. In other words, over a week ago. It has never been updated. This suggests that the reporting process the NDRRMC relies on is broken in Tacloban; counting the number of houses damaged cannot be a priority when the number of dead is in the thousands, when the infrastructure is in ruins and when only a fraction of city government employees are left to report for work.

On the other hand, the report’s estimates of houses completely destroyed in Aklan and Capiz, in Cebu and Iloilo help us realize—and perhaps also visualize—the true extent of Yolanda’s trail of destruction. It went well beyond Tacloban.

In Aklan, over 34,000 houses were recorded as totally damaged; in Capiz, the sum of totally damaged houses amounted to over 29,000 (with five towns reporting about the same tally—proof, perhaps, of the equity of destruction). In Iloilo, almost 75,000 houses were damaged completely (with another 70,000-plus recorded as partially damaged). And in Cebu province, some 88,000 houses were destroyed, with almost 53,000 partially damaged.

Even before the more accurate estimates from Leyte and Eastern Samar are factored in,  and even if we assume that all houses reported as partially damaged can be repaired in the immediate term (say, within the next week), we still end up with a staggering total: over 272,000 houses obliterated. Where will their occupants go? If we assume that rehabilitation of affected areas can be completed in six months, where will those residents whose houses were destroyed stay in the interim?

This is a problem that the brightest minds in the country, in both the public and private sectors, must begin, immediately, to address.