NEW YORK TIMES
In Typhoon Area, Kerry Warns of Threats of a Warming Planet
Jes Aznar for The New York Times
Pio Canayong is rebuilding his grandparents’ home on the land in Tacloban which is his family’s sole remaining possession. “I don’t want to move away,” he said.
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: December 18, 2013
TACLOBAN, the Philippines — After touring miles of roofless homes and shattered shantytowns destroyed by one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday announced that additional American humanitarian aid would be sent to the Philippines and described the giant typhoon as a warning of future extreme weather in a warming world.
THE LEDE
How to Help Typhoon Victims in the Philippines
A list of contact information for some organizations that plan to provide relief to victims of Typhoon Haiyan.
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Secretary of State John Kerry visited Tacloban on Wednesday.
“No words can do justice to the level of destruction we’ve seen in this entire community,” Mr. Kerry said. “This is a devastation that is unlike anything I’ve seen at this kind of scale.”
An initial severe shortage of food and clean water in the first two weeks afterTyphoon Haiyan made landfall on Nov. 8 has largely been alleviated. But four million people lost their homes to towering storm surge waves or gusts reaching 200 miles per hour, and the effort to rebuild them has barely begun.
The Philippine government raised the official death toll on Wednesday to 6,069, with 27,665 injured and 1,779 missing. But local officials say the number of dead will continue to rise as more bodies are uncovered in the debris.
Running water has been restored in some central areas of Tacloban but is still not available across large areas of devastated Leyte and Samar Islands. Full electricity service will take months to restore.
Mr. Kerry acknowledged the difficulty of applying climate science to any single meteorological event, but cited the destruction here as a caution about what could happen if the world does not limit emissions of greenhouse gases.
“While no single storm can be attributed to climate change, we do know to a certainty that rising temperatures will lead to longer and more unpredictable monsoon seasons and will lead to more extreme weather events,” Mr. Kerry said. “Looking around here, you see an unmistakable example of what an extreme weather event looks like, and a reminder of our responsibility to act to protect the future.”
Saying that Tacloban still looked like a war zone despite nearly six weeks of recovery efforts, Mr. Kerry announced that Washington would donate $24.6 million immediately for typhoon relief on top of the $62 million in aid already supplied by the United States. He said t the United States would consider further requests for relief from a reconstruction planning effort now underway in Manila, the capital.
President Benigno S. Aquino III of the Philippines said in a speech in Manila on Wednesday that the typhoon had inflicted $12.9 billion in damage and economic losses. He predicted that the rebuilding of the devastated region would last through 2017.
As part of a conference in Geneva on Monday that focused mainly on the need for humanitarian relief for refugees from Syria but included other crises around the globe, the United Nations requested $791 million to help typhoon victims, and said it had been able to raise only 30 percent of the money so far. The United Nations and the Red Cross have urgently appealed to foreign countries for four million heavy-duty corrugated steel sheets needed to replace roofs, as the Philippines has already used up most of the 120,000 it had in stock and has very limited ability to manufacture more.
The government has updated the death toll daily, but has left the number of missing unchanged for more than two weeks. Tacloban, a sprawling city of nearly 500,000 permanent and temporary residents, has a single small office to accept missing-person reports, and many residents said in interviews here over the last two weeks that they were not even aware that it existed.
Benjoe Cabacaba, a resident of the coastal San Jose neighborhood, said on Wednesday that his parents, his father-in-law, two sisters, a cousin, a close friend and six nieces and nephews had all vanished when storm surge waves as high as the coconut palms had crashed over their homes. Nobody has reported any of them missing, Mr. Cabacaba said, adding that he did not know if their bodies had ended up in a mass grave for the unidentified dead or were among the many swept out to sea and never seen again.
“We don’t know what to do” to report family members as missing, he said. “We can barely find food to eat on a daily basis — all my focus is on getting enough food for my family. It’s the same for everyone here.”
Jerry Yaokasin, the deputy mayor of Tacloban, said there was a strong reluctance at all levels of government to acknowledge the full death toll, but declined to discuss the reasons.
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