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A member of the Philippine Bureau of Fire Protection in a heavy gas mask stands over a body bag and gestures to alert his colleagues in the garbage truck used to transport victims’ remains to a mass grave.
The Hell of Typhoon Haiyan Santa Barbara Journalist Bears Witness to Disaster in the Philippines TEXT AND PHOTOS BY JA C K C R O S B I E
After spending the better part of a year as The Santa Barbara Independent’s listings editor, Jack Crosbie left the paper to embark on a career as an international correspondent. His first stop was the Republic of the Philippines, where Crosbie joined Santa Barbara’s Vitamin Angels on one of their nutrition distribution missions. The country had just experienced a savage earthquake, and days after Crosbie and Vitamin Angels brought some relief to Tacloban, the city was devastated by a typhoon of global headline–grabbing proportions. Here is Crosbie’s firsthand report on that city and country, filed from Manila.
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t around seven in the morning on November 8, SuperTyphoon Haiyan crashed into the shores of Eastern Samar province in the Philippines, making landfall almost directly over the city of Guiuan. After chewing through Samar, Haiyan — known as “Yolanda” in the Philippines — tore into the neighboring island of Leyte, again scoring a direct hit, this time on the city of Tacloban, a major transportation hub and population center in the Visayas region of the country. At its peak, Haiyan was a 370-mile-wide cyclone of fiendish winds that reached gusts of 235 miles per hour and sustained at just shy of 200 miles per hour. Storm surges brought water 17 feet straight up buildings, flooding the ground level of almost every structure in the affected coastal areas. If you’ve been anywhere near a television in the past two weeks, you probably know much of this and have heard that the number of confirmed deaths, which just broke 4,000, is expected to climb into five digits. At least 9.8 million people have been affected, but maybe more than 13 million, depending on whom you believe. Haiyan is playing out like most disasters in the modern news era, the dead and the cont’d page 20
An AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) soldier hands a United Nations high-calorie survival biscuit to a hungry refugee, one of hundreds crowded into waiting areas at Tacloban’s airport. november 21, 2013
THE INDEPENDENt
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