Philippines relief effort starts to make an impact

Radiating out from the centre of this typhoon-stricken city there are signs that some semblance of normal life is returning to small parts of the city centre. Major streets are being cleared of debris and some trade has resumed.

A number of street traders, perhaps 30, have returned to the large portside markets area and are selling tins of food, rice, noodles, instant coffee and soup, cooking oil and some fruit and vegetables. But almost all shops remain closed.

Aid workers are cautiously optimistic that in urban centres at least, the distribution of food and availability of emergency shelter and medicine has begun to have an impact. There are still concerns, however, about more remote areas. Aid distribution hubs have been set up in two other major urban centres, the west Leyte port of Ormoc which suffered extensive damage, and the east Samar town of Guiuan, which was almost destroyed.

Sixty-two government and private aid organisation teams are at work in affected areas. Acknowledging that “some pretty serious logistical hurdles” had had to be overcome, Matt Cochrane, the spokesman for the United Nation’s Office for the Co-Ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said 840,000 people, from an estimated 2.5 million in need of food, had received some food. Fuel was also getting into cities and petrol queues are expected to ease.

Basic needs
The government says that between 10 million and 12.9 million people have been affected by the typhoon which made landfall last Friday week. Of those, 4.9 million are believed to be children.

Non-governmental organisations have hired two barges to bring aid from Cebu to Ormoc. A roll on/roll off ferry with a capacity for 2,800 metric tons is also due in Tacloban from Cebu and work will carry on back and forth between the two ports as necessary. “There are concerns about some of the mountain areas at the centre of the island [of Leyte]. We know the needs there are going to be very basic,” said Mr Cochrane.

Key locations
Bulldozers, dumper trucks and teams of municipal workers and volunteers have made significant progress clearing some of the main streets in the city centre and major routes radiating out to other key locations, including the airport. The gathering up of bodies is a work in progress.

The single-storey airport terminal remains a wreck and may well have to be demolished. But departure and arrival areas have been carved out of the mess, their boundaries defined by builder’s wire mesh screening. The airport must now be one of the busiest in the region with Philippine Air Force Huet helicopters and H-60s owned by the US Navy (all ferrying relief aid to inaccessible places of distress). Regular civilian flights and aid continues to arrive in huge C130 Hercules transporters owned by among others the US, Philippines, Australia, Sweden and Korea.

The backlog of aid has mostly been taken away, some for immediate distribution, some for storage. Consequently, newly-arrived aid is moved with greater dispatch than heretofore.

The US is pouring aid into stricken areas. Helicopters operating off the carrier, the 5,000-personnel USS George Washington, which is at anchor off Samar, are constantly ferrying aid on to the island. Yesterday at Tacloban airport, the most senior American official to visit, Nancy Lindborg, announced a further $10 million in aid, bringing to $37 million the amount it is committed to spending.

“This will enable us to continue to move ahead with our help on things like the water system, on the logistics,” said Ms Lindborg. “We have a steady drumbeat of supplies coming in and being distributed.”

Field hospital
According to Aaron Macks, an Australian diplomat in Cebu who is assisting the Royal Australian Air Force and the Australian medical assistance team, who have build a well-equipped field hospital at the airport, some residents of Tacloban and other urban centres who had fled are starting to return.

“We’re not going to see huge numbers of evacuees from now on,” he said. Many residents left to obtain medicines for relatives and are now returning with them, and foodstuffs: “Pharmaceutical needs were a big deal, you know, grandma’s at home and she needs medicine.

His country’s Hercules is now flying people from non-stricken areas into the stricken areas to help relatives. They are seeing bad injuries such as lacerations, caused by flying objects. A week on, these wounds are infected and a number of patients have had to have amputations. Fifty-six babies had been born in disaster areas with some mothers “giving birth pretty much on tables”, said Mr Cochrane.

“In a lot of [other towns in Leyte and Samar] health services are very rudimentary. . . Another concern is the longer people stay in insanitary conditions,” said Patrick Fuller of the Red Cross.

Mr Cochrane, on being asked if he thought aid was slow in getting to distressed areas, said: “This disaster was on a scale that this country had absolutely never experienced. This is a country that is hit by 20 to 25 typhoons every year and has got significant capacity to respond but what happened here was beyond experience.”

In addition, the country was already coping with the aftermath of an earlier typhoon and earthquake, he said. “I really think that’s an important context to give when we talk about the response.”

Meanwhile, China said yesterday it was ready to send an emergency medical team to the Philippines to help typhoon survivors, and was just waiting for approval from Manila.

China’s response to the disaster has been slow. The world’s second- largest economy initially said it was giving $200,000 (€148,000) and then raised that by $1.64 million. On Sunday, it said it was ready to send rescue and medical teams. “The emergency medical team that the Chinese government is preparing to send to the Philippines’ disaster area is ready to go,” said a foreign ministry spokesman.