MANILA, Philippines – To President Benigno Aquino III, the top priority is caring for those who survived Super Typhoon Yolanda.
Aquino admitted the initial number of casualties, although still subject to verification, “is really alarming,” but he added, “the priority has to be, to take care of the people who are alive and those who are injured.”
The President has tasked the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to start retrieving bodies – many of which line the streets, if not buried in rubble.
“I think the local government units have already designated areas for mass burials because they pose a public health hazard,” he said.
But caring for the living – those who are desperate for aid – also poses a huge challenge.
Aquino said part of the unprecedented difficulty is the breakdown in leadership since the local government has also been rendered helpless. He said “other functions of government will be provided by the various (national) departments.”
“We’ll be adding personnel here. The local government unit has told us that a lot of their personnel have not reported,” he said.
Game changer
The presence of officials and their coordination with the national government, he said, will be a game changer in helping the administration decipher the needs of areas hit by the typhoon. READ: Tormented typhoon victims scour for food)
“That’s why we’ve been tasking our Department of Interior and Local Government to go and talk to each individual local executive and to get whatever data they possess with the end in view of determining which communities we lack information on, are isolated, so that we can send the necessary response,” he said.
“For instance, we’re talking about power; we’re talking food and water. So that is the priority. In other areas it might be medicine, in others it might be just clearing the national highways. So we want to be able to send the correct assets to address the correctly identified problems at the soonest possible time.”
One of the most intense typhoons on record, Yolanda whipped across the central parts of the country for most of Friday, November 8, tearing down houses and taking lives, although the official death toll has yet to be confirmed. By Sunday, however, there were reports that the death toll may have reached as many as 10,000.
Added challenge
Aquino said the government is working on building bunkhouses to house “about 45,000 families” whose houses were completely destroyed.
“But the priority now has to be food, restoration of water, and power and communications,” he said.
He said it was also an added challenge that communications are down, making it difficult to disseminate information to panicking victims, who have resorted to looting in the aftermath of the super typhoon to meet their and their families’ basic needs.
“But the idea of showing the people here that they don’t have to be desperate, it’s coming, if it’s not already on the way. Even if we get to land it here, how do you actually tell the people that it’s here?” he asked.
“Because you don’t have TV, you don’t have radio, you don’t have newspapers to be able to disseminate the information hence the anxiety persists. So that is a new challenge for us.”
Additionally, “moving the food from areas where there is an abundance” is also a problem because roads have yet to be cleared.
Aquino was accompanied to Tacloban City by Defense Secretary Voltaire Gazmin, Interior Secretary Mar Roxas, Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman, Public Works Secretary Rogelio Singson, Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla, Transportation Secretary Emilio Abaya, and Secretary to the Cabinet Rene Almendras.
As of posting time, the government said it is still studying the possibility of declaring a state of national emergency. – Rappler.com
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