Obama may send more troops to help
The number of American troops helping the relief effort in the typhoon-hit Philippines could triple to more than 1,000 by the end of the week, U.S. officials said Wednesday. After a very difficult first few days, Senior Obama administration officials are cautiously optimistic that logistical bottlenecks that have held up large quantities of aid material are easing. The first airlift of hygiene kits and plastic sheeting from the U.S. Agency for International Development was distributed Wednesday to help 10,000 families, and another consignment is due to arrive in the capital Manila today. The first shipment of U.S. food aid is expected to be distributed by the U.N. World Food Program in the next day or so. The U.S. is using C-130 transport planes and Osprey helicopters to transport aid, which have also been used to evacuate about 800 victims from Tacloban to Manila.
Five days after Typhoon Haiyan ripped through the central Philippines, panic was spreading Wednesday across the disaster zone and residents were resorting to increasingly desperate measures to stay alive.
Many here have even resorted to raiding for food.
Eight people were crushed to death Wednesday when a huge mob stormed a rice warehouse near Tacloban, one of the worst-hit cities, local authorities said. More than 100,000 bags of rice were carted away in the melee, according to local news reports.
Elsewhere, residents dug up underground pipes and smashed them open to get water.
A run-down, single-story building with filthy floors at Tacloban’s ruined airport has become the area’s main medical center for victims of last week’s powerful typhoon. It has little medicine, virtually no facilities and very few doctors.
Hundreds of injured people, pregnant women, children and the elderly have poured into the squat, white building behind the control tower since Haiyan ravaged the eastern Philippines on Friday, killing thousands. Doctors who have been dealing with cuts, fractures and pregnancy’ complications said Wednesday they soon expect to be treating more serious problems such as pneumonia, dehydration, diarrhea and infections.
With victims whose corpses had spent days putrefying on streets and under piles of debris, the true death toll from the typhoon remains to be seen.
The Philippine government put the official death toll at 2,275 Wednesday, but aid workers feared it would continue to grow. The United Nations estimates that more than 11 million people were affected by the storm, one of the most powerful ever to make landfall.
Flights ferrying aid from around the world were arriving at the airport in Cebu, which has been turned into a logistics hub for the relief efforts. The World Food Program distributed rice and other items to nearly 50,000 people in the Tacloban area Wednesday, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.
While the cogs of what promises to be a massive international aid effort are beginning to turn, they are not quick enough for the 600,000 people displaced, many of them homeless, hungry and thirsty. Food, water and medicines are only trickling into the worst affected areas.
With the Tacloban airport battered and roads made impassable by debris, very little aid has arrived.
The gridlock threatened to paralyze rescue operations in the most devastated part of the Philippines, with aid piling up but few ways to distribute it and an influx of emergency volunteers but no place to house them.
The intensifying frustrations of delivering aid five days after the storm elicited a plea from the top U.N. relief official to the mayor of Tacloban.
“The priority has got to be, let’s get the food in, let’s get the water in. We got a lot more come in today, But even that won’t be enough, We really need to scale up operation in an ongoing basis,” U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told reporters after touring Talcoban, the capital of Leyte province.
Mayor Alfred Romualdez’s best advice to residents was to flee to other cities and find shelter with relatives if they could, saying that the local authorities were struggling to provide enough food and water and faced difficulties in maintaining law and order.
“People are absolutely desperate … which is why it is absolutely essential that we begin to move much faster than we have,” said Katherine Manik, national director for the U.S.-based aid group ChildFund International.
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Disease is also becoming a concern. A nonprofit group from France that responds to natural disasters had run through its entire supply of tetanus vaccine in just two days, as crowds of people with lacerations from the typhoon or its aftermath had lined up for injections. Many streets here are so clogged with debris that pedestrians must walk carefully over piles of boards and other construction materials with protruding nails.
Many children have begun showing up at the group’s field hospital with fevers and diarrhea as well, probably from drinking contaminated water, said Arie Levy, the president of Sauveteurs Sans Frontières. “The situation is just catastrophic.”
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