By TODD PITMAN
Nov. 13, 2013 12:44 PM EST
TACLOBAN, Philippines (AP) — Two
days before the typhoon hit, officials rolled through this city with
bullhorns, urging residents to get to higher ground or take refuge in
evacuation centers. Warnings were broadcast on state television and radio.
Some left. Some didn't.
Residents steeled themselves for
the high winds, floods and mudslides that routinely come with the typhoons
that afflict this tropical nation. But virtually no one was prepared for
Typhoon Haiyan's storm surge, a 6-meter-high (20-foot-high) wall of water
headed straight for them.
"It was supposed to be
safe," said Linda Maie, who stayed in her one-room house more than half a
kilometer (mile) inland. She had heard the warnings but said her Tacloban
(tuk-LOH-ban) neighborhood "has never even flooded in my 61 years."
Her family stocked up on canned
food, water and candles and covered their TV, laptops and appliances in
plastic bags. But when her 16-year-old daughter, Alexa Wung, awoke at 5 a.m.
Friday to howling winds and heavy rain, it was clear that Haiyan was not a
typical storm.
The house was shaking. Its wooden
door frame and window hinges were banging. Peeking through the windows, Alexa
saw doors and screens flying and crashing.
Their neighborhood was coming
apart.
Water began seeping in through
the doorway as Alexa huddled in the tiny house with her mother and brother.
Then it burst through like an explosion, ripping half the door off and quickly
flooding the room with knee-high water. Within minutes, it was chest-high.
By now, the family was on the
dining table, watching in horror. Alexa's brother, Victor Vincent, glanced at
the ceiling as the precious pocket of air grew smaller. They thought of
escaping, but Linda couldn't swim.
Alexa checked her cell phone. It
was 8:30 a.m. The icon for her mobile service provider was replaced with a
circle with a slash through it.
"I knew then that even if we
could scream for help, nobody in the world could hear us," Alexa said.
"We were cut off from everything."
And the water was still rising.
___
It would be more than a day
before the outside world knew what had happened.
Haiyan was among the most
powerful typhoons on record when it struck, with wind estimates at landfall as
high as 315 kph (195 mph). But the first news reports hours later suggested
that it had moved across the islands so fast that the country might have
escaped a major catastrophe. The reality was that Tacloban and other hard-hit
communities had been cut off, with electricity and cell phone towers knocked
out.
The worries, in Talcoban and
around the world, had been on the wind much more than the water. That's why
many of the 800,000 people who were evacuated found themselves in seemingly
sturdy concrete buildings that could not protect them when the storm surge — sea
water pushed by the typhoon — rushed in.
"Everybody knew a big storm
was coming," said Mark Burke, an American native of Washington state who
lives in Tacloban with his three small children and worked as a civilian pilot
on contracts supporting U.S. naval forces in the region. "But I had no
idea it was going to be this hell. ... Nobody imagined what was about to
happen."
The water rose so high that some
residents punched holes in their roofs with their bare hands to escape.
Burke and his kids hid in a bedroom
until a wall of mud came through the doors. The master bed was floating.
"Then we all got on the
piano, and it started floating through the hallway," he said. "The
water kept rising, and we eventually climbed up into the attic and stayed
there for a day and a half."
___
In another part of Tacloban,
Eflide Bacsal was standing in the kitchen of her family's home when the wall
of water hit with a furious roar.
"It was like a bomb —
BOOM!" said her 23-year-old sister, Gennette Bacsal. "It felt like an
earthquake."
The wave smashed through the
windows and swept Eflide off her feet, sucking the 26-year-old under the
swirling water. She frantically waved her arms, trying to find something to
grasp. Her fingers closed around the power cord to the refrigerator. She held
on as tight as she could and tried to pull herself to the surface, but the
water only pushed her deeper.
She couldn't breathe. Couldn't
think. Couldn't see. In her panic, she began swallowing water. Everything went
black. She felt herself dying. She surrendered.
And then, a hand appeared — her
father's. He grabbed her shirt and yanked her to the surface.
He hauled Eflide to the second
floor of their home, where they waited along with Eflide's sisters and mother
until the surge had passed.
Other family members were less
fortunate. Relatives including Eflide and Gennette's brother, 38-year-old
Gonathan Bacsal, had taken refuge in a church, but they fled as water rushed
in. As they ran through nearby woods, a cousin was decapitated by a piece of
metal that whizzed through the air.
Young and elderly relatives who
could not swim were trapped by the rising water, but the family said Gonathan
rescued many of them. He, too, was killed by debris: The storm blew several
nails and a shard of metal into his neck.
___
As Alexa and her family stood on
their dining table, they contemplated their own deaths. The water was at
Alexa's chest, and her mother's chin.
"Where will we go? What can
we hang on to?" Alexa cried.
They were still amazed by the
flood. No typhoon could cause this, Alexa thought.
Then her mother was splashed by
water on her lips. It was salty. It dawned on them: This was from the sea.
Fish flittered across Alexa's
back, and she recoiled in a panic.
The family was at their very
limit, and so, thankfully, was the storm. The water stopped rising, and began,
very slowly, to recede. It was again knee-high by the time Alexa walked
outside.
Their neighborhood, of barber
shops and restaurants and homes and streets filled with small buses known here
as jeepneys, was gone. There was only a vast sea of debris: wooden beams
filled with nails, shattered toilets and glass, concrete rubble, uprooted
trees, twisted power transformers.
Survivors wandered, dazed and
wounded, covered in mud and grime. Many were barefoot with seeping gashes in
their feet and bruises all over. Some covered their wounds with cloth, or
diapers.
"Tacloban was
unrecognizable," Alexa said. "It was as if Tacloban never existed at
all."
___
There was something else in the
flatted landscape: corpses. And five days after Haiyan leveled Tacloban, many
are still there.
Scores of them lay at roadsides
for authorities to retrieve, covered with whatever people could find —
corrugated iron rooftop slabs, wooden planks, cardboard, a broken desk drawer.
Two bodies wrapped in white tarps
lay on a bus-stop bench. Another sat on the ground below. People rolling
luggage and carrying backpacks walked past, covering their mouths to protect
against the sickly stench.
One orange dump truck moved
through the city to collect the remains. Emergency workers unloaded a dozen of
them at building that once sold souvenirs. In all, there were more than 170
bodies in black bags, spread side by side.
Bulldozers have cleared debris from
most main streets, but the sidewalks are filled with everything imaginable:
broken speakers, typewriters, cables, artificial Christmas trees.
There have been no major food
distributions. The city's main hospital has been gutted. Medicines are running
out. Police can be seen chasing scavengers through the streets.
International humanitarian
organizations have yet to arrive. With no tents, people are sleeping in
destroyed homes. One family took shelter in the shade of a giant uprooted
tree, and cooked under a ripped gray rooftop held down with a broken
basketball pole.
And some people are even farther
away from help. On Tuesday, military helicopters flew 15 minutes from Tacloban
to the wasteland of a town called Tanawan, past a lake with bodies still floating
in it and over bridges that had collapsed.
Amid the ruins, desperate
residents frantically waved their arms. Many had scrawled desperate messages
in the ruins: "HELP! FOOD. WATER." Some messages appeared to be in
chalk. One cry for help was spelled out in white clothing.
___
Today, American and Filipino
C-130 cargo aircraft roar constantly at the Tacloban airport. Each plane can
only take out around 150 people, and every flight is a disappointment to
hundreds of residents left behind on the tarmac.
Gennette and Eflide have made it
to Cebu. Burke and his kids flew to Manila.
Alexa and her mother walked two
hours to the ravaged airport terminal in hopes of leaving. Victor asked them
to leave, so he could worry about guarding the house instead of feeding them.
They were near the front of the
flight line on Tuesday. But after a C-130 landed, the crowd surged to try to
get to the plane. The crush of people was so intense that a 7-year-old girl
passed out. Alexa and Linda could not endure it and stepped away.
They sat on a curb, under an
umbrella. Alexa was in tears. Their destroyed city lay behind them, an
apocalyptic graveyard marked with disfigured trees and ruin. They said the
government, and the world, had done nothing to help them.
Their new plan: to leave Tacloban
by bus and reach relatives in Manila.
Alexa said she will return,
eventually.
"Filipinos have a saying:
Weeds don't die easily," she said. "When it's safe, when there is
electricity, when it's livable, I'll come back."
___
AP writers Jim Gomez and Kristen
Gelineau in Tacloban contributed to this report.
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