17/11/2013 Reporters

suspicion of murder. Now on BBC News it is time for

reporters Mac. Hello and welcome to this special

edition of Reporters. I'm Tim Willcox, in Tacloban, one of the

worst hit areas of Typhoon Haiyan. In this week's programme, islands of

death and destruction, thousands killed and millions affected as one

of the worst typhoons on record ravages the Philippines. Survivors

with nothing left, Jon Donnison travels to one city where the cries

for help are still overwhelming. Please, come to my city. We need

you. We need help. Taking the world by surprise, our

environmental editor David Shipman explains why the force of Typhoon

Haiyan was so difficult to predict. And turning to faith, George Alagiah

reports on the important role the church is now playing for Asia's

largest Catholic population. Hello and welcome to Reporters, where we

will be assessing the impact of Typhoon Haiyan. We now know that

millions of people in more than 40 provinces in the Philippines were

affected by the super storm, one of the strongest ever to make landfall.

The survivors have had a very difficult time for the past week and

Rupert Wingfield`Hayes has been listening to some of their stories.

You may find some of the images disturbing.

This is the main government hospital in the middle of Tacloban.

Joseph and his friends have come to collect the body of his sister. For

three days it lay uncovered in the street. Now with a home`made cotton

and masks to cover the stench, they must carry it on foot to the burial

ground. In the street where Josef's sister lived, this man is trying to

make a list of all of his neighbours by debt. `` who are dead. Servers

are all children? Yes. A woman was found in that house. It is still

really almost impossible to know how many people have died in this

devastation, in this disaster. To give you an idea, we have been told

in this one street, 18 people died. 18 just in this little stretch of

road in the neighbourhood. Many bodies are still lying in the houses

or out in the baking sun. They are starting to putrefy. In the next

street over, Mildred and her family survived by clinging to the roof of

the house. For the survivors, the biggest here now is hunger. They are

trying to drown their waterlogged rice. Nobody knows for sure if it is

still edible. Where is the government? Where is the help? The

biggest problem here is food. Many people have died. We need food.

Water. We have rice. That is all we need. That is the most important.

All of the dead bodies must be buried. Down by the sea they are

digging a grave. The mother of the three young men. Suddenly, one of

her sons is overcome by grief and frustration. His mother's body is

stuck under a fallen coconut tree. They cannot get it out. I ask her

husband how they are managing. I think very bad. I could not sleep.

She was a very good mother. I am very hopeless. Everything is

gone. A short distance away, there have dug a much bigger hole. A mass

grave. All afternoon the grim procession continues. We counted at

least 30 bodies going on here. How many more are being dug along this

coast? We do not know. Except, it is many.

As the full scale of the damage emerged, there are complaints by

some that the aid effort was being poorly run. We went to see some of

the survivors without food or shelter.

There is not much left with a roof in Tacloban. The Astrodome Arena was

one of the few buildings big enough to withstand Typhoon Haiyan. It is

now a shelter for hundreds of families who have lost or missing.

`` everything. Thousands of people are camped out here in filthy

conditions. Seven families are living in this one tent. Finally

there is a team of doctors, one of the first signs of help beginning to

arrive. A stair landing is now home for this family. Lee managed to get

his wife Jessica and seven children here just hours before the typhoon

hit. They have one`month`old twin boys. He tells me they have enough

baby formula to last just four more days. He says only God is giving him

the strength to carry on. He says he's lucky his family are still

alive. Thousands of people were seeking shelter here at the

Astrodome when the typhoon struck. This was one of the main evacuation

centres, but such was the size of the storm surge coming in from the

ocean that the water came right up to this balcony. People can see aid

is now being flown in greater amounts. But little has arrived here

yet. This man is a school teacher. Like many he feels abandoned. People

of the world, come to my city. We need you. Please. Come to my city.

We need you. We need help. We need help very badly. Until it comes to,

people like Lee are having to comfort their families as best they

can. Aid supplies eventually reached some

parts of the country. At other areas were completely without power,

communications, food or water. We saw the damage overall.

Far out on the horizon, an island struck by the Eye of the typhoon.

The lifeline is the passenger ferry. The aid eventually comes, this is

how it will reach the people. And it is how this woman hopes she will

find her family. She, her sister, her daughter on a rescue mission. In

the hope her parents made it through the storm. The have a car full of

food and water, but do not know what to expect on the road ahead. We came

to rescue my family. They do not have food. I heard from the social

network, Facebook, there is no more food. Nothing to do. I do not know

if they are alive or not. We do not have any connection yet. We followed

them on the road north. It is now a familiar sight. House after house

destroyed. Trees ripped up and tossed aside. Electricity cables

down. Hanging by the road. The same landscape for mile after mile. The

reason that indications have been so bad of course is because the mobile

phone asked supple comedown. Writs have been blocked. If people have

family members they have not heard from, the only thing they can do is

come out looking for them. And because such a huge area of the

central Philippines was affected, getting a doubt all these places is

proving slow. Afternoon turned into night. The word worsened as we got

near to the family home. They did not know what to expect, seeing all

the damage. But then. A family reunited. Everyone is fine. The

homes were destroyed. There is a full food or sign of eight. But they

survived. `` little food or sign of aid. The whole area is alive. That

is the most important thing to me and for my family and my

neighbourhood. One family's story among millions.

The Philippines is no stranger to violent weather. They have many

typhoons each year. But why was this one so strong? David Shipman has

been investigating. It takes a view from the air to see

the extraordinary scale of devastation. Ferocious winds

combined with massive walls of water to lay waste to whole communities.

All this is the result of weather at its most extreme. For many people

there was simply nowhere to hide. The survivors are now left appealing

for aid from the outside world. The typhoon had been forecast but proved

completely overwhelming. The thing which made it particularly dangerous

was the fact that it reached its peak intensity at the point it made

landfall and on that basis it might be one of the strongest typhoons to

ever make landfall. To understand this disaster let's use our virtual

reality studio to try to piece together how this catastrophic

weather unfolded. The people of the Philippines are used to the threat

of typhoons. They have had more than 20 this year alone but nowhere near

the scale of this one. Like all tropical storms it began with a

loose cluster of thunderclouds, nothing unusual, but these quickly

merged together to form a single weather system which started

rotating, pulling air up into its centre. The storm stretched over 300

miles. Buy now it was a typhoon and heat

rising from the water added to its string. Higher temperatures and eat

more energy. This meant that in the eye of the storm and around it, the

wind kept accelerating. Intense low pressure also lifted the sea surface

to create a storm surge, another source of danger for anybody and

spa. Only the strongest shopping would help them survive. This town

before the disaster and the same view after. Almost every house had

its roof ripped off. Here is Tacloban scene last year. It had a

similar effect. An explosive force. Today, an official from the

Philippines was that a climate conference. He is from Tacloban and

called for action on global warming. We can fix this, we can

stop this madness right now, right here. An emotional moment. The fact

is, no single weather even can be blamed on climate change. The

massive size of this typhoon is clearly visible from space and

scientists are warning that storms this vicious maybe, more likely.

This country is made up of thousands of islands and communications are

usually difficult. Our correspondent went to the place where the storm at

first made landfall. This is where it all started. The very first

encounter between storm and land. Not much of a contest. It makes this

the first village to be erased and Maria among the first mothers to

lose a child. She came here the day before to visit had parents at the

beach with her two`year`old son. He was so full of life, so naughty. In

the typhoon came and, `` can enter, her grandfather tried to save him.

The baby drowned. One week on and the survivors here are still waiting

for aid. This may have in the first place to get it but it seems to be

amongst the very last to get any help because this is an extremely

remote corner of the Philippines. The storm essentially cut it off

from the outside world. A few miles away, this town is in no better

shape. It is still hard to believe that wind alone did all this. I came

to see the man in charge, a 33 `year`old. The military have been

trying to stop looters. He is nursing an injury and twitching with

stress. The mayor, like the town, is running on empty. They have to be

the mayor. You look exhausted. I am stressed but a need to be strong.

What do you need? We need food. We need shelters for the people. Easy

to see why. The town's sports centre was supposed to be a century but 12

died here. This is where my mother was. This 19 `year`old shows me were

she and her family were trapped. I kept calling them. My mother and my

father but they wouldn't respond. Only my brother saved me. I can

still see him. He was in one piece but he was... He was so cold. He was

bleeding. Both parents, a doctor and an accountant, died beneath the

rubble. She and her 13 `year`old brother have been able to bury them

to date in a storm ravaged symmetry. `` bury them today. The children,

like the town, left wondering what they have now. They want to be like

my mother. A doctor? A great mother. Suddenly, a welcome sight overhead.

Two big military aircraft fly past. The crowd rushes out to an old

airstrip. They have to come here. They have to come here and give us

food. These plans give me hope. Sure enough, at the Americans land on a

runway there built during an earlier operation here, World War II. No

supplies on board, but a multinational assessment team and

promises that aid will finally arrive tomorrow. The visitors leave

with a 78 `year`old grandmother needing urgent kidney dialysis. This

woman it tries to get through because she has seven children in

another town. She is desperate to contact them. No room today. You can

sense of frustration building here. Back in town the queues for fuel and

water growing. This place was cut off so long that it is no surprise

that things are desperate here. It is still a state of emergency and

yet what is striking about this town is how quickly the community has

come together again and started to get things done. People may not have

insurance here, but they have phenomenal resilience. For now,

Alfie and her brother are leaving to stay with relatives somewhere that

safer inland. You get the sense this shattered town will recover from a

storm of a lifetime. As the week progressed, international aid

eventually arrived. In the interim, it was local institutions that had

to fill in. Six out of ten Filipinos are Catholic. George has been

assessing the role of the church in this disaster. A place for prayer is

now in place for century. Typhoon Haiyan blew through the doors of

this church and the parishioners walked in homeless. The pews where

they once held to worship now the spaces they call home. The father is

like the good Shepherd with his flock. He never doubted this is what

he should do. The churches is for the poor. They are the sacraments.

We have to save lives. Six days on, he has not seen any official aid

here. He doesn't blame his parishioners for what many are

describing as looting. For me, or what they did was not immoral

because that is a basic need. When they loot the groceries, it a want

to live. It is not a sin. In all, there are more than 300 families

here, that is nearly 2000 people. Unlike some of her neighbours, this

woman's family, three generations of it, survived the typhoon intact.

They described how they clung to each other on a roof. All around

them there are families with similar stories. She said she would take me

to her home just a five`minute walk away. She had lived in the house for

20 years and in the area for more than double that. So your house is

just behind the big house that is standing ? TRANSLATION: We felt all

alone in its time after the water came in. We were asking but it

seemed that nobody was around to help. We needed help with which

Aldrin and our house. There were no doctors around and there was no

food. `` needed help with Alec children and our house.

Sunday Mass is going ahead, around them, the world is upside down. That

is all from this special edition of Reporters. Goodbye for now.