The mayor of Typhoon destroyed Tacloban is telling residents to flee the destroyed city.
Mayor Alfred Romualdez told residents to leave after gunmen firing on the convoy stopped the city’s first attempt at a mass burial. The bodies had to be returned to a gathering place by the remnants of city hall where the stench was overwhelming.
The mayor said that the city does not have enough trucks and heavy equipment to distribute relief that is piling up at the Tacloban airport.
“I have to decide at every meeting which is more important, relief goods or picking up cadavers,” Romualdez said.
Government officials say the Philippine military is stretched so thin it’s impossible to provide security for cities like Tacloban.
After most major media reports focused on the massive devastation to the Philippine city of Tacloban where at least 10,000 are feared dead, the Philippine Red Cross has released information that the damage in that city is being reported all along the coastline.
Samar, located across the Gulf of Leyte, is still unreachable in many areas by government officials and military troops. Villages all along the coastline were swamped with waves of 20 feet or more and some small fishing villages are completely gone.
The Philippine Armed Forces Central Command said their official death toll is 942 but that with so many places still inaccessible to military troops and the counts of the dead nowhere near done in places they can reach, that total is not even close to a full accounting of victims.
Residents moving seven miles outside of downtown Tacloban to the city’s airport are describing the situation as “worse than hell.” One woman yelled at President Benigno Aquino to get international help to their nation now.
Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez, who barely escaped being killed himself, said that he does not know a single person who has not lost at least one close relative in the storm.
Aid workers are now concerned for survivors because drinking water from wells is likely contaminated and that disease could cause thousands of deaths over the next few weeks.
