By Tom Phillips, The Telegraph
Desperate scramble for ever scarcer resources and atmosphere of lawlessness leads to upsurge in violence in storm’s aftermath.
Survivors jostle to get a chance to board a C-130 military transport plane at Tacloban Aiport Photo: BULLIT MARQUEZ/AP
Josefina Evangelista, a 60-year-old woman, cowered in the shell of the former arrivals lounge in Tacloban’s airport in almost total darkness.
“There are people running around on the streets,” she said, explaining how she and her husband, Anthony, fled their refuge in a neighbour’s home for fear of the chaos unfolding at night.
Amid the desperation and lawlessness in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan, the devastated city – and others like it – have descended into insecurity and violence.
“We heard gunshots. We cannot stay there at night. It is too dangerous,” she told The Telegraph.
Instead, the couple now sits in silence and surrounded by the stench of urine, clutching their belongings in white and red duty-free shopping bags plucked from the airport’s ruins.The family escaped harm in the typhoon, fleeing the home they feared would collapse for a neighbour’s sturdier one.
“It was like the sound of an airplane. The roofs were flying,” she recalled.
But the worse came after the waters and the winds had gone, she said.
They hope to escape to Cebu or Manila, Mrs Evangelista said. “Tomorrow. Maybe. Please help us, sir.”
Ninety-nine miles away, at Cebu airport, men and women queued anxiously for the PAL Express, a Canadian turboprop that was operating one of the first commercial flights into Tacloban since Friday.
Among the passengers of Flight 2987 were aid workers, students, a Filipina nun and dozens of locals whose relatives had disappeared in the typhoon or who wanted to get aid in.
Read the full story by Tom Phillips from the Telegraph.
