Thousands of people on Wednesday, Nov 13, jostled and begged for seats on scarce flights out of Tacloban, one of the hardest hit areas of Typhoon Yolanda.
Five days after Yolanda ripped apart entire coastal communities, flattening out a lot of these provinces, the situation in Tacloban is becoming more and more dire with essential supplies low and the increasingly desperate survivors jostling at the airport.
“Everybody is panicking,” Captain Emily Chang, a navy doctor, told the AFP. “They say there is no food, no water. They want to get out of here,” she added, saying doctors at the airport had run ou of medicine, including antibiotics. Earlier, it has been reported that a warehouse of the National Food Authority in Leyte has been mobbed, leaving 8 people dead and more than 30,000 bags of rice looted.
“We are examining everyone but there’s very little we can do until more medical supplies arrive.”
The United Nations estimates that 10,000 people may have died in Tacloban, but President Aquino said late Tuesday he believes the figure is “too much” adding that 2,500 “is the figure we’re working on.”
At the Tacloban airport, AFP journalists witnessed exhausted and famished survivors pushing and shoving each other to get on one of the few flights out of the city.
Health secretary Enrique One admitted authorities were struggling to deal with the sheer number of the dead. Speaking to DZMM, he said they had “delayed” the retrieval of bodies “because we ran out of body bags.”
Story: Cecile Morella/AFP
Photo: File/AFP
