Death toll continues to rise in Tacloban

MANILA, Philippines - The death toll from Typhoon Yolanda that swept the Visayas region has increased by a thousand overnight.

A notice board in Tacloban City Hall estimated the deaths at 4,000 yesterday, up from 2,000 a day before, in this town alone.

Hours later, Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez apologized and said the toll was for the whole Visayas region.

The toll, marked up on a whiteboard, was compiled by officials who started burying bodies in a mass grave on Thursday.

Romualdez said some people may have been swept out to sea and their bodies lost after a tsunami-like wall of seawater slammed into coastal areas. One neighborhood with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 was now deserted, he said.

The City Hall toll was the first public acknowledgement that the number of fatalities would likely far exceed an estimate given this week by President Aquino, who said the loss of life from Yolanda would be closer to 2,000 or 2,500.

Official confirmed deaths nationwide rose by more than 1,000 overnight to 3,621 yesterday after the typhoon, one of the strongest ever recorded, roared across the Visayas region a week ago.

The figures came from the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC), which said 1,140 remain missing.

Adding to the confusion, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the latest overall death toll was at 4,460, but a spokesman said it was now reviewing the figure.

The OCHA has reported the 4,460 fatality count in the Visayas and placed the number of people affected by the typhoon to 11.8 million and a total of 243,000 houses destroyed.

It later withdrew this report, saying it had gotten wrong data.  

Malacañang, however, maintained the official count and said they are not buying the higher death figures given by the UN body.

“There is no attempt to hide or to fudge any figures. Any assertion otherwise would just be pure speculations at this point. That’s just pure speculation,” deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said.

She said the “confusion” may have also arisen on the basis that the UN spokesman “recanted” his own estimates, “although there is also one agency that is insisting that they have not.”

“As far as government is concerned, we are working with the official casualty count that is released by the NDRRMC,” Valte said.

Valte said the NDRRMC is the primary source of information because “most of the departments are part of that particular structure.”

On Tuesday, Aquino said estimates of 10,000 dead by local officials were overstated and caused by “emotional trauma.”

Regional police director Chief Superintendent Elmer Soria, who made that estimate to media, was removed from his post on Thursday.

A police spokesman said Soria was due to be transferred to headquarters in Manila. But a senior police official said Soria could have been reassigned because of his unauthorized casualty estimate.

“I have already instructed all the concerned agencies that they should not release or discuss their own opinion,” said NDRRMC executive director Eduardo del Rosario.

The NDRRMC has been highly criticized for being slow in responding to the basic needs – food, water, medicine and shelter – of the thousands of hungry individuals displaced by Typhoon Yolanda.

‘The smell is getting worse’

Stunned survivors in Tacloban said the toll could be many thousands. “There are a lot of dead people on the street in our neighborhood, by the trash,” said Aiza Umpacan, a 27-year-old resident of San Jose, one of the worst hit neighborhoods of the city.

“There are still a lot of streets that were not visited by the disaster relief operations. They are just going through the highways, not the inner streets,” she said.

“The smell is getting worse and we actually have neighbors who have been brought to hospital because they are getting sick.”

On the other hand, authorities have started burying some of 3,621 bodies in mass graves.

Interior and Local Government Secretary Manuel Roxas II assured the public that due respect was given to the dead as the corpses were not just thrown in mass graves.

“All are undergoing the process. We will not just dump them into the mass graves. We treat the bodies with respect, photographs are being taken,” Roxas said.

He said bulldozers have dug graves for the bodies after being processed, identified, and photographed, and if possible, secure their fingerprints.

Roxas said the processing was being made to allow their relatives to trace them.

The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) is helping in the forensic investigation and DNA sampling.

The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) has sent teams to operate payloaders, bulldozers and dump trucks to retrieve some of the bodies buried under the tons of debris in Tacloban.

The preliminary number of missing as of Friday, according to the Philippine Red Cross (PRC), rose to 25,000 from 22,000 a day earlier. That could include people who have since been located, it said.

PRC secretary-general Gwen Pang said they are building “tent cities” for the evacuees, identifying three areas where these would be set up.

“Our chairman, Richard Gordon, had acquired lands where the tent cities can be built. In a tent city, the people will be more comfortable because there will be a house, water, lights, latrine, shower facilities, communal system,” Pang told dzRH radio.

Pang said the PRC wanted the survivors to have a “semblance of normalcy” to help them rebuild their lives. – With Pia Lee-Brago, Delon Porcalla, Cecille Suerte Felipe, Alexis Romero, Sheila Crisostomo, Perseus Echeminada