Looting and gunfire show desperation in Leyte, island worst hit by typhoon
Looters overran a rice warehouse on the island worst hit by the Philippine typhoon, setting off a wall collapse that killed eight people and then carting off thousands of sacks of the grain. And members of the security forces exchanged gunfire with an armed gang yesterday.
Looters overran a rice warehouse on the island worst hit by the Philippine typhoon, setting off a wall collapse that killed eight people and then carting off thousands of sacks of the grain. And members of the security forces exchanged gunfire with an armed gang yesterday.
The incidents in or close to the city at the centre of international relief efforts add to concerns about the slow pace of aid distribution in the disaster zone and that parts of the area are descending into chaos.
There has been looting for the last three days, but the situation has stabilised
Five long days after the typhoon wasted the eastern seaboard of the Philippines, the cogs of what promises to be a massive international aid effort are beginning to turn, but not quickly enough for the some 600,000 people displaced, many of them homeless, hungry and thirsty.
"There's a bit of a logjam to be absolutely honest getting stuff in here," said the UN's Sebastian Rhodes Stampa against the roar of a C-130 military transport plane landing behind him at the airport in Tacloban.
"It's almost all in country - either in Manila or in Cebu, but it's not here. We're going to have a real challenge with logistics in terms of getting things out of here, into town, out of town, into the other areas," he said. "The reason for that essentially is that there are no trucks, the roads are all closed."
Planes, ships and trucks were all on their way to the region, loaded with generators, water purifying kits and emergency lights - vital equipment needed to sustain a major relief mission. Airports were reopening in the region, and the US military said it was installing equipment to allow the damaged Tacloban airport to operate all the time.
Tacloban's mayor, Alfred Romualdez, urged residents to flee the city because local authorities were having trouble providing food and water and maintaining order, The New York Times reported. He said the city was in desperate need of trucks to distribute relief shipments that were accumulating at the city's airport as well as equipment to pull decaying corpses from the rubble.