One of the most intense typhoons on record whipped the Philippines yesterday, killing at least three people and terrifying millions as monster winds tore apart homes.
Super Typhoon Haiyan smashed into coastal communities on the central island of Samar, about 600km southeast of Manila, before dawn yesterday, with maximum sustained winds of about 315kph.
“It was frightening. The wind was so strong, it was so loud, like a screaming woman. I could see trees being toppled down,” said Liwayway Sabuco, a saleswoman from Catbalogan, a major city on Samar.
Photo: AFP
The government said three people had been confirmed killed and another man was missing after he fell off a gangplank in the central port of Cebu.
However, the death toll was expected to rise, with authorities unable to immediately contact the worst-affected areas and Haiyan only expected to leave the Philippines in the evening.
An average of 20 major storms or typhoons, many of them deadly, batter the Philippines each year. The developing country is particularly vulnerable because it is often the first major landmass for the storms after they build over the Pacific Ocean.
The Philippines suffered the world’s strongest storm last year, when Typhoon Bopha left about 2,000 people dead or missing on the southern island of Mindanao.
However, Haiyan’s wind strength made it one of the four most-powerful typhoons ever recorded in the world, and the most intense to have made landfall, said Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at US-based Weather Underground.
Haiyan generated wind gusts of 379kph yesterday morning, the US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said.
Masters said the previous record for the strongest typhoon to make landfall was Hurricane Camille, which hit Mississippi in the US with sustained winds of 305kph in 1969.
In Tacloban, a city of more than 200,000 people close to where Haiyan made landfall, corrugated iron sheets were ripped off roofs and floated with the wind before crashing into buildings, according to video footage taken by a resident.
Flash floods also turned Tacloban’s streets into rivers, while a photo from an ABS-CBN television reporter showed six bamboo houses washed away along a beach more than 200km to the south.
Authorities expressed initial confidence that the death toll from Haiyan would not climb dramatically, citing a massive effort starting two days before the typhoon hit to evacuate those in vulnerable areas and make other preparations.
More than 718,000 people had sought shelter in evacuation centers, 3,000 ferries had been locked down at ports and hundreds of flights were canceled, the national disaster management council’s spokesman Reynaldo Balido said.
“In terms of damage, we cannot avoid that... but the silver lining here is that the casualties are only three as of now,” he said in Manila.
“It is possible that this will increase, but we don’t think it will increase that much more, unlike in previous typhoons. The people have learnt their lesson,” he said.
Another reason for optimism was that Haiyan did not bring extreme rains, which is typically the major cause of deaths for typhoons in the Philippines.
Nevertheless, Balido said disaster officials had yet to make contact with many cities and towns that were believed to have been badly damaged, and it was impossible to get a clear picture of the damage yesterday evening.
The International Organization for Migration also warned that widespread damage and casualties was likely.
It said one particularly vulnerable area in Haiyan’s path was the central island of Bohol, the epicenter of a magnitude 7.1 earthquake last month that killed 222 people and where 350,000 people were living in temporary shelters.
Haiyan was forecast to exit the Philippines after 9pm and into South China Sea, tracking toward Vietnam and Laos.
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