Typhoon Strikes with Nature’s Hammer

Days had passed since Girlyn Antillon had heard any word from her parents, her six siblings or any other family members, all stranded in the Philippine city of Tacloban–ground zero for the devastation wreaked by Supertyphoon Haiyan. Finally, on Nov. 12, four days after Haiyan made landfall, Antillon caught a ferry from Cebu to the port of Baybay on the island of Leyte. From there she and a colleague hitched a three-hour ride to Tacloban. The roads were strewn with downed power lines and tin roofs that had been scattered by the force of the storm. And there were hungry children, their hands outstretched, carrying homemade signs that read only HELP. Closer to the city, the haphazard piles of debris grew, and the first corpses were visible–some in body bags, some exposed on the sodden ground. There were lines of battered survivors carrying water bottles and backpacks, waiting for handouts of food and water. As the car finally entered Tacloban, Antillon could say only this: “Jesus Christ.”

Long before Haiyan came ashore, it was clear that the storm forming in the western Pacific would be one for the record books. In anticipation, some 800,000 people were evacuated from their homes in the central Philippines, which sat directly in the path of the storm. But there was no way of preparing for its power. At its height, Haiyan was off the charts, registering 8.1 on the 8-point Dvorak scale used to measure the intensity of tropical cyclones based on satellite data. The storm was more than 300 miles wide. Unlike most other tropical storms, which weaken before they hit land, Haiyan struck the central Philippines at near peak strength, with sustained winds estimated at 195 m.p.h. and gusts of up to 230 m.p.h. If confirmed, that would make Haiyan the most powerful tropical storm ever recorded to make landfall. The islands of Leyte, Samar, Cebu and Panay were lashed by winds and rain and inundated by a coastal storm surge, reportedly in excess of 16 ft. in Tacloban.

Haiyan’s strength and the wall of seawater it brought ashore overwhelmed the Philippine government’s disaster preparations. Officials put the death toll at around 2,500–a figure many aid workers believe is too low–while some 670,000 Filipinos have been displaced. The economic cost of the storm could be as much as $14 billion. But after a disaster of this scale, accurate numbers can take days, if not weeks, to tally as rescuers pick their way to isolated coastal villages cut off from the world. The U.N. estimates that over 9.5 million people were affected by Haiyan.

Many survivors were left with little more than their lives. In Daanbantayan, a cluster of villages on the northern tip of Cebu island, west of Tacloban, 26-year-old Lieza Canete gestured at a pillow, blanket and sleeping mat. Everything else she owned had been swept out to sea. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing.”

Slowly, too slowly, aid has begun to reach the worst-hit areas, some of it from the U.S. military, which dispatched naval ships to the area, including the aircraft carrier George Washington. But getting help to people is proving extraordinarily difficult. Seaports have been obliterated, roads destroyed and airstrips badly damaged. In Tacloban, where food and water are running low, damage to the airport means that pilots have been forced to land by sight, slowing the pace of deliveries. There is fear that disease will spread from the lack of sanitation and from the bodies left in the open. Frustration on the ground has grown, and soldiers dispatched to the disaster area have struggled to maintain control. “I’ve never in my 17 years of work seen people so desperate to get food,” says Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross.

Haiyan’s sheer power ensured that the storm would be deadly, but there were other factors that contributed to the calamity. The Philippines sits in the Tornado Alley of typhoons–from five to 10 hit the country annually on average, and about half of the strongest typhoons, hurricanes and tropical cyclones measured at landfall over the past 80 years have hit there. The intense winds coupled with the narrow shape of San Pedro and San Pablo Bay funneled a tremendous storm surge into Tacloban, inundating a city of 220,000 people, leaving no safe place for evacuees to flee.

Nature’s wrath was compounded by man-made failures. The extreme poverty and rapid population growth in the Philippines–much of it in vulnerable coastal areas–ensured that more people and property would be in harm’s way. A 2012 report named the Philippines as the third most vulnerable nation to climate-change effects. The damage could have been even worse had the storm hit low-lying Manila, with its metro population of 12 million. In cities like Tacloban–which has nearly tripled in population over the past 40 years–many houses have wooden walls and grass roofs, which provide no shelter from a storm. While the Philippines has been enjoying rapid economic growth recently, it has invested too little in hard infrastructure. It has a far lower percentage of paved roads than its neighbors and low scores in fixed phone lines and electricity access. Those are the sorts of basic failures that turn a natural disaster into a total catastrophe.

Haiyan was so terrible, it’s no surprise that people quickly began looking at another possible culprit: climate change. As sea and air temperatures increase, tropical storms potentially have more energy to draw, making them stronger and more deadly. At the annual U.N. climate-change summit in Warsaw, the Filipino diplomat Naderev Saño explicitly linked Haiyan and climate change in a speech during the opening session. “What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness,” he said. “The climate crisis is madness.”

In truth, global warming likely played only a small role, if any, in turbocharging Supertyphoon Haiyan. While sea-level rise–which has been increasing faster in most of the Philippines than the global average–would have added slightly to the massive storm surge, and warmer temperatures might have given Haiyan a bit more power, the reality is that the typhoon would have been devastating even in the absence of climate change. The link between global warming and tropical-storm strength and frequency is still muddy, especially in the Pacific, where poor historical records of past storms make it more difficult to know if things really are getting worse. But scientists do have more confidence about what’s likely to come in the decades ahead if we can’t curb global warming: stronger tropical storms. Haiyan wasn’t the result of climate change, but the typhoon’s strength could well be a sign of catastrophes to come.

For now, the focus remains where it should be: on the survivors of Haiyan and on their dead. Girlyn Antillon was lucky. As she closed in on her family home in Tacloban, she showed pieces of paper with her parents’ names to listless survivors sitting amid the rubble. Finally she met two men who had seen her relatives, and an ecstatic Antillon began to run, dodging power lines and corpses. She found her whole family, alive and well, putting together the pieces of their badly damaged house. “We knew the typhoon was coming, but we weren’t prepared for the storm surge,” says Antillon’s brother Erwin. “It was like a tsunami.” The celebration, though, was short. There is little water and less food in Tacloban, and Antillon’s family, like others who weathered the storm, will need to wait for the aid trickling in from outside. Survival is its own burden.

–With reporting from Dan Kedmey/Daanbantayan, Per Liljas/Tacloban and Emily Rauhala/Beijing