Yolanda exodus: An account of the chaos and terror in Tacloban

November 10, 2013

 

It is 5:00 a.m, third day after the storm, Yolanda. Jangjang, Jerome, Jeff, Valerie and Jane left on foot, thinking to check on Ayo Cafe [One of the restaurants owned by the Alunans] along Apitong Drive. All of them have taken care to wear solid footwear instead of the  usual casual slippers.

We know that the city has gone mad with terror and want and grief, stores looted, people grabbing what they could in desperation. There is total news blackout, no signals from any of the telcos, no radio, no television, the telephone system busted. The city is full of rumors, whispered or shouted from mouth to mouth. At this moment, it is still total blackness outside. And silence, except for an occasional dog barking, and the insistent crowing of the cocks announcing dawn.

 

The storm Yolanda is three days past. It woke us up at 5:00 with occasional gusts which rapidly transformed into a steady stream of wind, growing in intensity at every minute. That morning, still feeling safe in our shelter, the household busied itself preparing breakfast. The table had been set in the usual way and eggs were boiling, one egg for each one of the expanded household, some of the staff from Ayo Cafe which we had taken in to weather out the storm. But before long the wind intensified, and no one felt like eating. 

 

The door that opens to the balcony was being forced open by the wind and it was all eight people could do to keep it closed to stop the wind from blasting into the house. Water was flooding in as parts of the roof gave way. The only dry areas in the house were the two toilets. My room proved the most protected space, though water was coming in too, through the slits around the aircon unit which we had not bothered to seal properly. After securing the door in the second floor, everyone sought any kind of dry place he could find to weather out the storm. 

 

The firewall was shuddering, even the floor at its base, at the ferocious and steady onslaught of the wind. All we could see from the window was the white fury of wind and water cutting off a farther view of the neighborhood. All we could hear was the roaring and howling of the storm. We did not even hear the trees falling around us, nor when our water tank, still full of water, flew off its perch like a blown leaf. The unimaginable fury lasted for a good one hour. 

 

We huddled in my room, sure that we had done everything we could to keep safe and prayed that the blowing would soon be over. We breathed a little easier when the wall stopped shuddering, the worst was over and it was just a matter now of waiting for it to pass.

 

Baby Amina was fretful the whole while, she surely could not understand why we held on to her and would not let her play. Or perhaps she was just picking up the tension from all of us. Most of the glass portions of the windows held, fortunately for us, and we kept bodily dry even if water was pouring into the house from the blown-off portions of the roof and from some of the broken glass of the second floor windows. At about 9:30, the wind abated, the sky lightened and the rain turned to a drizzle. We crept out of the house to look around. The shack in front of us was now just a pile of debris. The trees which hadn't fallen had either lost their crowns, or were shorn of their leaves. The hills in front of the house were stripped and bald, the trunks of trees showing white against the gray of battered grass. 

 

We dared not think beyond the immediate necessity of restoring order to the household. We were setting the table for breakfast when the storm began blowing in earnest and scattered our composure. We grabbed some food and set to the cleaning. Water in one room was ankle deep. Parts of the ceiling had caved in. The beds were soaked. But everyone was accounted for and the house still stood. We busied ourselves putting things to a semblance of order. 

 

Early in the afternoon, Ebeb came in with the news that Mayanne's house had completely collapsed, but that his house (which we call Santol on account of the huge santol tree in front of it) was okay, even if parts of it had also been blown away. Dax had gone off to check on his family in the Trust compound. He came back with the news that everyone was safe but the warehouses were ruined. Three months' stock of goods for the Leyte and Samar area exposed to the elements. 

Three to four hours the wind raged and, when it left, the landscape had turned into a holocaust; gutted, roofless buildings, rubble and debris piled on the streets, hundreds of thousands left homeless, children orphaned, mothers dazed lamenting for the infants that the storm surge had torn from their arms, old people bereft of support. The living wandered the streets looking for their dead or for their loved ones among the corpses of the drowned that littered the city. The wounded, the maimed, the sick had nowhere to go for treatment for even the hospitals had been washed out. 

 
Health practitioners were unable to attend to anyone as they too were reeling from the effects of the storm. There was nowhere to turn to for help or support. Fortunes had been overturned, The intricate system of dependencies on which any city rested had been blasted. The fragile contract that kept the peace and stretched the mantle of respect among the social classes snapped and quickly unravelled. The city turned quickly into what seemed like a war zone but it was war without drawn lines. Everyone had become a potential enemy. 

 

The paranoia was infectious and surged quickly across the city, aggravated by the loss of communication, the impassability of the roads, the lack of transport facilities, the seeming absence of government. 

 

It would have been crucial for the battered survivors of Yolanda's holocaust to see the presence of authority in command in the immediate hours immediately after the storm, someone to lead, to take command, to provide comfort, assurance, the promise of care. But the storm had drained the last bit of strength from everyone, no one spared. 

 

One had to be on ground zero to understand why no hero rose to seize the day, so to speak. The storm had spared no one. Before anyone could go out to help, one had to attend to one's own first. 

 

 

 

November 12, 2013, Delgado Subdivision

 

The whole day after the wind had gone away, we struggled to restore normalcy to the household, removing as much water as we could from the rooms, fix a meal assess the damage to the house. We counted our blessings: everyone accounted for, no one hurt, the house intact except for the roof, food and water good for a month at least. 

 

At 10:30 a.m. Dax took a bicycle to cross over to the Trust compound where his parents and siblings live with their families. Eb-eb came over to ask how things were with us with the news that Mayanne's house had completely collapsed. Dax returned with the news that the family was safe but two warehouses were down. The enormity of these news did not hit us immediately. We were just happy to be alive.

 

Now, with the wind gone, silence reigned all around. We dared not magine how bad things were beyond our own immediate area.  We knew that the frail shanties of the informal settlers outside the Delgado Subdivision had all been blown to the ground. Fallen trees barred access to the neighboring Imelda Village and V & G Subdivision. Electric wires and fallen electric posts everywhere. My house had proven its sturdiness, but roof repairs were urgent. That day we had meals in between endless sweeping and mopping.

 

The crew from Ayo arrived from Apitong around 4:00 p.m. and reported that the store had lost its roof, the roll-up door dented, the glass window probably broken. We prevailed upon them to stay for the night, though they were edging to go home. It wouldn't have been safe for them to go home anywhere, for by then the city was slowly waking up to its desperate situation. It would soon be dark and the roads impassable. Secure in the minimal comfort we have established in the house, we plotted out, as the darkness thickened, the sleeping arrangements. We were grateful that night for the clean sheets and pillows that we still had. We gave everyone a warm, dry place to sleep that night. 

 

Everywhere else in the city, however, thousands had died, and thousands more had been rendered homeless, but we had no way of knowing that. Thousands bereft, hungry, hurt, grieving, and scared beyond belief. When we woke up the next day, no change from the day before, still no radio, no telephones, no signals, no cars moving. The clear sky boded sunshine. We kept looking up, waiting  for airplanes that would mean that outside help was coming. The intrepid slowly crawled out of their shelters to explore the city on foot, on bicycles and motorbikes – to check on relatives, to look for news.

 

That was how we began to hear things, rumors of all sorts: a water surge in the downtown area rising up three stories high. Fallen trees, debris from houses, electric posts blocking the streets, the mayor's wife missing, death in the Astrodome where thousands had taken shelter, death in the downtown area where the storm surge had taken down people who had not heeded the warning. More news: the mayor's wife found and also his two children, the bodies  flown to Manila, the mayor in a hospital, a story conflicting with someone's report of seeing the mayor talking to Sec. Mar Roxas the afternoon after the storm. 

 

Massive looting going on around the city – from food stores to clothes to appliances. We heard that the road to Calbayog was clear and some people from Manila had succeeded in getting into the beleaguered city. Morning of the second day, the children took a car and trailed what roads were passable. They came upon the looting going on at the Robinson's Mall, the Coca-Cola Plant, the Natasha show room, the Mercury Drug stores, groceries, big and small, and later on, warehouses. 

 

The whole world is familiar by now with the sight of men carting away refrigerators, TV sets, washing machines, clothes, bags, shoes, jewelry, even ATM machines, hospital beds being used as trolley for the looted goods. These have been recorded by media. 

 

But it must make a difference to be an eyewitness, to see people with bags of clothes taken from the Natasha showroom, happily showing off their loot to one another while right beside them lie corpses of the drowned. A sight like that sears itself to the very root of one's humanity and instills an unnameable terror. That image is hard to forget, a mental souvenir to haunt one forever. It is as though a doorway had suddenly been flung open into a strange room in one's house where a monster lurks, that monster, strange though he may seem, being one of one's own. For what one sees through that doorway so rudely blastede by catastrophe is a recognizably human face. But the gloat in the eyes, the smile, the pride in having acquired goods for free – all these belong to some monster, one you've always suspected, lurked in every human soul, including your own, just waiting for its chance to play. It takes a crisis of monumental proportion to unlock this monster from the prison of our civilities.

 

Two days was too long to leave the devastated city in darkness and silence and to use their own devices to deal with their circumstances. No matter what explanation authorities raise to justify the slow response, the people were left too long alone to invent their own solutions to overcome the desperate situation. Does this explain the mob rule that followed, the rampant wasteful looting that made the people of the city appear like a lawless barbaric horde? It seemed like the final storm surge to complete the destruction of the city, this unravelling of  community and the breakdown of the moral grounds which bind it together. 

 

The ugly greed and shameful indifference tore across the social classes, threatening neighborhoods with anarchy and crime. But this is only one picture. As stores and warehouses fell one after another to the looters and no one in authority seem to be rising up to restore order, vaster numbers kept their humanity. Families stuck together, strangers helped one another. Even the looters, it is said, shared their loot with neighbors who had been unable to join their raids. As there were eyewitnesses to the criminal acts perpetrated on those ignominious days, so were there witnesses too, to the acts of kindness, heroism, generosity and compassion that eased suffering even momentarily. 

 

This is the strength that will make the city heal and rebuild.

 

 

 

The Exodus, November 13-15, 2013,  Dumaguete City

 

The looting continued for several days. Our neighborhood caught on to it, too, they went out at crack of dawn and came home at midday bringing sacks of loot, mostly food, snack items, coffee; canned goods. Vilma shared with us a bag of dog food for which she had no use, some makeup stuff and two adhesive mice catchers. The children were beginning to worry about my medicines – how do we replenish the supply when it ran out? The hospitals have been decommissioned or were having a hard time coping with the volume of patients needing immediate attention, the lack of medical practitioners, their operation badly impaired by the flood that had ruined the ground floor where diagnostics and emergency functions were undertaken. 

 

My daughter begged me, "Please be very careful, you can't afford to get sick now." One-year old Amina would soon be running out of her special feeding formula too – she is allergic to ordinary milk formula – how to replenish it? 

 

But worse than that, the children were into the restaurant business. With the city in total disarray, all systems down, including the supply chains, the immediate future looked bleak.  "We will soon run out of funds if we stay on," they said. "We cannot wait. We need to be operational or we could not recover." That was the harsh  reality. Decision was made – leave the city as soon as possible. 

 

Our exodus began on the 13th of November, Anya and Dax and baby Amina, Jerome and Jangjang and myself. Two girls came with us, my research assistant, Aivee, and Amina's caregiver, the young girl Gretel. Rose was with us and two young men, her son, and a ward. Another group left Tacloban November 14, Ebeb, Eva and Mayanne and two young men, Rose's sons. They had the  four dogs with them, Yoda, Trixie, Mingot, and the orphan Twix who had come all the way from Naga City to join the cohort. 

 

And now we are packed in the house of Juliet Flores, our refugee camp, we tell her in a joke. But it is not a joke, we are truly refugees. We are very lucky to have this haven, to be welcomed by this lady whose heart is bigger than the island of Negros. We are united with Babbu and Langging and Wynn and Yanna. A meeting had taken place among the siblings. Plans for the immediate future have been mapped. We feel blessed and humbled at the same time. Also guilty that we have run away at a time when we are needed.

Tacloban, we will return, we promise to one another. 

 

We are safe for now, but not out of danger. For now we know danger follows us everywhere. What happens to other people could happen to us. But until then, we live. — KDM, GMA News

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