Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Typhoon wrecked Tacloban city

http://www.weather.com/news/weather-hurricanes/filipinos-escape-typhoon-wasteland-20131125Romnick Abadines' heart pounded as a Philippine air force C-130 carried him above typhoon-wrecked Tacloban city. He had never been on a plane before, never watched silvery-white clouds pass from a small round window. It was not the first time, or the last, that he felt helpless and out of his element.
The frail, 31-year-old farmer lost his shanty to Typhoon Haiyan, which flattened much of Tacloban in Leyte province as it killed more than 5,200 people. Now he lays idle in a tent shelter in suburban Manila, where he has no known relatives and little chance of finding more than menial and temporary work.
More than 12,000 people displaced by the massive Nov. 8 have made it to the capital. Most are with relatives; those with no family here are in shelters. Many have no idea how or where to rebuild their lives.
(MORE: Typhoon Haiyan Photos)
"What will happen to us when this kindness ends?" asked Maribel Villajos, a 37-year-old mother of three children who sat listlessly with her husband on cots surrounded by bags of newly donated clothes, potato chips and instant coffee sachets at the same shelter where Abadines and his family were taken.

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Investigating Typhoon Haiyan

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Villajos' husband is a carpenter, but his tools were swept away along with their house in the tsunami-like storm surge that swept far into Tacloban and ruined much of the densely-populated coastal city.
Thousands of people from areas wrecked by Haiyan clambered aboard free C-130 mercy flights to Manila without any plan, in a desperate bid to escape the hunger, uncertainties and lingering stench of death back home. Others arrived here by bus, or fled to central Cebu province, which like the capital is regarded by rural poor Filipinos as a greener pasture in this impoverished Southeast Asian nation of more than 96 million people.
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