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here's a very interesting account of yolanda from someone who's been used to covering natural disasters.  worth a read.


Meeting a monster: First person account

By DJ Yap
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Sunday, November 17th, 2013

(Editor’s Note: DJ Yap, the Inquirer’s environment reporter, and photographer Niño Jesus Orbeta were the first Inquirer team sent from Manila to cover Supertyphoon “Yolanda” in Tacloban City. They arrived on Nov. 7, a day before the world’s strongest typhoon landed. His tweet on that fateful Friday morning—“Sounds of glass shattering; hotel guests in lobby, restless, alarmed. ‘Jesus Christ,’ says our fotog Niño Orbeta. ‘Worse than Reming.’”—was the first and last time we heard from them until they sent word through GMA 7 on Saturday night that they made it through the storm.)

The woman’s smile was a ray of sunshine utterly out of place on that dark and desperate Friday.


AP File Photo

She was standing among the ruins of an old church in downtown Tacloban when I chanced upon her, just hours after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international name: “Haiyan”) tore into the city, sending its residents into the clutches of despair.

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Along with those neighbors, Jaca had taken refuge on the second floor of their house in a village overlooking Cancabato Bay. They survived, almost miraculously, the ferocious surge of wind and water that flattened entire villages and killed multitudes in the coastal parts of Leyte.

But something was bothering Jaca.

Her 33-year-old son, she said, was reluctant to let the neighbors stay with them and to share the week’s supply of food and water the family had stocked up in preparation for the storm.

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Of the emotional stories we documented, it was Jaca’s account, punctuated by smiles and tears, that struck the most strident chord in me.

Here was a mother driven to tears not by the loss of her loved ones or the deaths all around her, but by the erosion of her son’s humanity.

It was at some level a triumph of the spirit.

Orbeta and I arrived in Tacloban early Thursday morning. It was drizzling when our plane touched down in what then seemed to be an auspicious time.

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We spent the rest of Thursday surveying the storm preparations around the city and the adjacent town of Palo, where Douglas MacArthur famously landed in 1944.

Residents went about their business unmindful of the ominous clouds on the horizon. It was calm, perhaps too calm.

That night, Orbeta and I discussed our game plan for the next day, Yolanda’s landfall. The expectation was Tacloban would be hit, but not too badly. We were to hire a vehicle to take us to the areas expected to be most devastated from the storm, and we would return to Tacloban to file our stories and photographs.

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‘This is a strong one’

At 4 a.m. on Friday, we woke to the howling and whistling of the wind outside, punctuated by what sounded like booms and crashes, of things slamming into buildings, the grating noises of metal hitting metal, of glass breaking and shattering. It was so fierce the walls of the hotel shook lightly.

“Jesus Christ. This is a strong one,” Orbeta said, quickly slinging his camera around his neck to snap pictures of the scene outside. We went to the fire exit on the fourth floor to look through the glass window.

The view was white. Sheets of water were sweeping furiously inland, practically horizontally.

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What’s going on?

Downstairs, the water had reached the ceiling of the ground floor. Hotel guests were leaving their rooms, filling the lobby, alarmed and restless.

“What is going on?” one whispered.

Conversations were hushed, as though people were afraid of further angering the heavens.

The lights went out.

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I entertained morbid thoughts. Before shutting down my phones and laptop to save on battery, I deleted everything I didn’t want people to find there should I be killed. I felt like laughing at the ridiculousness of it.

I lay in my bed, Orbeta in his. “Many people are probably dying right now,” I said aloud. Orbeta agreed.

In the darkness we listened in silence to Yolanda’s roar.

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First bodies

I saw the first bodies almost immediately. They were of a woman and her young son on a wooden cart being pushed by two men.

I signaled to Orbeta, and he began taking pictures.

I chased the tragic carriage through the main thoroughfare to the small alleys. Everywhere the pushcart went, residents mutely watched, some of them coming closer to look at the faces of the dead.

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And those I managed to interview spoke of a heart-wrenching grief.

Len de Guzman emerged, hysterical from a public elementary school that was supposed to be an evacuation center. Her 6-year-old daughter Ellen Shane had died in her arms, drowned as they clung to the ceiling of a classroom, frantically trying to keep their heads above the water.

Bodies were everywhere, under the rubble, on the sidewalks, some covered with blankets, others uncovered, still dripping blood.

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Our feet were blistered, our backs sore. We returned to the hotel in the evening, spent and hungry.

“We will have to ration our food,” I told Orbeta in jest. We laughed at our meager supplies laid out on the bedside table.

The hotel management had served porridge and boiled eggs to the guests earlier that day, but the porridge was gone by the time we came back. We ate a boiled egg and drank precious sips of water for dinner that night.

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Human nature

The paranoia and panic were contagious. Truthfully, I was feeling it, too. Our drinking water was running out. Our empty stomachs were groaning.

Were we to resort to looting, too? It was unconscionable, but in some ways, understandable.

Was Thomas Hobbes right after all? Was this the true nature of humans without law and without government?

Fortunately, Orbeta and I came across a woman selling bottled water, soft drinks and potato chips from a roadside. She allowed us to buy two big bottles of water and a couple of packs of chips. She couldn’t sell us more, the woman said, as she had nothing else to feed her family.

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By chance, we met a team from GMA 7 network led by reporters Jiggy Manicad and Micaela Papa. They were on their way to Palo, where they had set up to broadcast live via satellite.

(The Inquirer would later acquire satellite phones to be used by subsequent teams sent to the area.)

We had also wanted to visit Palo, so we accepted the GMA 7 team’s kind offer to join their party.

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Tears streamed down their faces, and the older brother could only sit down beside the body, his face crumpled.

It was heart-wrenching.

Palo was just as devastated as Tacloban, if not more so.

The corpses, most of them now in body bags, were taken to a cathedral. They had started to putrefy. Family members stood some distance away.

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We’re alive

Later that night, toward the end of his report, Jiggy Manicad announced on live TV that we were safe. (One editor, Juliet Labog-Javellana, would tell me later how worried sick she was about us, and how Manicad’s announcement eased her worries).

The GMA 7 team also told us that they were to hitch a ride on a C-130 military transport plane, which was to land in the Tacloban airport early the next morning. Manicad offered to let us come with them, and we gladly accepted.

The news team had also invited a few others who were stranded in Tacloban. They didn’t need to do it, but they did. I am forever thankful to them for their generosity.

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Meeting a monster

I am no stranger to monster typhoons.

I’d flown to Mindanao for two Decembers in a row, in 2011 and 2012, to report on the aftermath of Tropical Storm “Sendong” (“Washi”) and Typhoon “Pablo” (“Bopha”), respectively. I covered the devastation inflicted by Tropical Storm “Ondoy” (“Ketsana”) on the eastern parts of Metro Manila four years ago.

But Yolanda was the first monster I set out to meet a day before it came.

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