Official death toll nears 5,000 as more bodies recovered

MANILA, Philippines - The death toll of Super Typhoon Yolanda is nearing 5,000, with more bodies in destroyed fishponds and fish cages in Tacloban City waiting to be retrieved.

Over the weekend, a member of joint Task Force Cadaver, headed by Senior Superintendent Pablito Cordeta of the Bureau of Fire Protection, said their recovery team in Tacloban recovered 780 bodies last Saturday and 123 more Sunday, or a total of 903 already decomposing cadavers.

“These are newly recovered bodies in Tacloban City. It will take us three days to process the retrieved bodies before submitting the official count to the NDRRMC,” said the task force member, referring to the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.

The task force is composed of local and foreign soldiers as well as volunteer groups.

The NDRRMC reported yesterday that the official death toll remains at 3,976 as of yesterday.

The NDRRMC official death toll plus the 903 bodies recovered by Task Force Cadaver makes a total of 4,881 dead as of noon yesterday.

This is expected to increase in the coming days as recovery teams from the joint task force are now moving toward the coastal areas and expect to collect more bodies trapped and floating in destroyed fishponds and fish cages.

Julieto Abogado, 21-year-old evacuee from Tacloban who had reached Manila, said the fatality figure may well double.

Before he finally got on a C-130 cargo plane for Manila the other day, Abogado said he was among those who helped government troops collect the bodies of typhoon victims that littered the streets of Tacloban.

President Aquino, in an earlier interview with CNN, estimated that some 2,000 to 2,500 persons could have perished at the height of the storm, rebutting the forecast of 10,000 made by Eastern Visayas Regional Police director Chief Superintendent Elmer Soria.

Soria was relieved from his post for making his own death forecast in contrast to Aquino’s estimate in the entire storm-devastated Eastern and Western Visayas regions.

The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) said their sea patrol personnel recovered bodies of a man, a woman and a girl near the San Juanico Bridge off Leyte yesterday morning.

PCG spokesman Commander Armand Balilo said their patrol teams have recovered 10 bodies since Saturday.

Balilo said after the typhoon the PCG deployed rubber boats to search for bodies in the coastal barangays in Leyte and Samar.

In its 6 a.m. report yesterday, the NDRRMC said that aside from the 3,976 individuals reported dead, 18,175 more were injured and 1,598 others still missing.

The killer storm also affected 2,212,955 families or more than 10 million persons from the 10,365 barangays in 44 provinces, 574 towns and 57 cities in Central, Eastern and Western Visayas, Bicol region, parts of Eastern and Northern Mindanao, the Caraga region and two regions in Southern Tagalog.

Of the total affected, 850,058 families or 4,008,894 persons whose houses were either partially or totally demolished by Yolanda are now staying at 1,550 evacuation centers set up by government and non-government groups.

Initial cost of damage to agriculture and infrastructure left by Yolanda in all of the ravaged regions was placed at P10.4 billion – P1.3 billion in infrastructure and P9.089 billion in agriculture.

The NDRRMC announced yesterday that the port in Bulan, Sorsogon has been opened to receive and load relief convoys, to declog the port of Matnog, the main supply route for the storm-wracked provinces of Samar and Leyte. – With Evelyn Macairan, Alexis Romero, Cecille Suerte Felipe