Sunday, December 07, 2014 3:46:49 PM
As Typhoon Hagupit Hits Philippines, Evacuees Express Relief
"Disaster diplomacy at play in Haiyan aid response by China, United States"
By AUSTIN RAMZYDEC. 7, 2014
Homes damaged by Typhoon Hagupit in Tacloban in the central Philippines on Sunday.
Marlon Tano/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
LEGAZPI, the Philippines — As Typhoon Hagupit churned across the Philippines .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/philippines/index.html?inline=nyt-geo .. on Sunday, residents of the eastern part of the island nation expressed relief that they had joined the hundreds of thousands who evacuated to safer ground.
Eleanor Llaneta, 60, decided to follow the advice of her neighborhood captain and leave her home in Albay Province, on the southeastern tip of Luzon Island, on Friday, more than a day before Typhoon Hagupit made landfall in the country.
In past years she might have considered staying put, but a year’s worth of news about the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,300 people dead or missing after hitting the Philippines in November 2013, convinced her that prudence was the best course.
“We only knew about storm surges after Tacloban,” said Ms. Llaneta, referring to the city that Haiyan left filled with mud, debris and dead bodies just over one year ago.
By late Sunday, two casualties had been reported, and what had been a classified as supertyphoon was far weaker than Haiyan was when it hit and was continuing to weaken. The storm, which is expected to push its way across the country until Wednesday, was generating strong winds and rain but the overall effect was not as devastating as worst-case scenarios had anticipated.
The government announced Sunday evening that two people were confirmed to have been killed by the storm, a one-year-old girl and a 65-year-old man who died of hypothermia in the central province of Iloilo.
In Albay Province, Ms. Llaneta and about 560,000 others were evacuated ahead of the storm’s arrival, according to local officials. As of 4 a.m. Sunday more than 1.2 million people were evacuated nationwide, Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, wrote on Facebook.
Hagupit is expected to hopscotch across islands as it makes its way west. Maximum sustained winds near the center had dropped to about 100 miles an hour by Sunday morning, but the slow churn over the nation could dump large amounts of rain, setting off floods and mudslides.
MAP
With full assessments of damaged areas far from finished, the government is not ready to publicly declare success in riding out the storm. Still, officials and aid workers sounded notes of optimism that darker predictions of the storm’s destructiveness would not materialize.
“The picture looks O.K. so far in the daylight,” said Kate Marshall, a spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “But we still don’t know what happens when the typhoon moves northwest.”
Motorists made their way through fallen trees on Sunday after
Typhoon Hagupit hit Samar island in the Philippines.
Francis R. Malasig/European Pressphoto Agency
Nearly a day after Hagupit hit, Albay had yet to record a storm-related death or serious injury, said Jukes Nunez, an Albay special operations officer. “Disaster preparedness, we want to make it part of daily life, just like brushing your teeth,” said Mr. Nunez. “We are one of the most vulnerable areas in the Philippines.”
The Mayon Volcano rises over Albay, adding a further risk of landslides to the wind, floods and storm surges that often follow typhoons. In 2006, Typhoon Durian dumped heavy rain on the area, setting off mudslides that buried villages below Mayon and killing more than 1,000 people.
Residents in Legazpi, the Philippines, protect
themselves from the rain and heavy winds of Typhoon
Hagupit on Sunday. Aaron Favila/Associated Press
One significant development in disaster preparedness here is a much wider knowledge of the threat from storm surges, the walls of water pulled along by typhoons that can quickly flood low-lying coastal areas. In Tacloban last year a wall of water from Typhoon Haiyan ripped across a peninsular neighborhood known as San Jose, crumpling cement houses and causing a large number of deaths.
An assessment of that disaster by a German government-funded sustainable development agency said that many residents in Tacloban — where the storm surge was the cause of most of the fatalities — were not familiar with the risks and did not evacuate. “Serious warnings and more effective evacuations along the coastline could have saved many lives,” the report said.
Families prepare to return to their homes from an evacuation center in Legazpi,
the Philippines. Credit Jes Aznar for The New York Times
In the year since Haiyan, residents have been exposed to much more discussion about the risks of typhoons, and evacuees in the city of Legazpi say it has contributed to their willingness to leave their homes.
“We were hearing all of this news on the radio about storm surges,” said Maria Ampo, 46, who weathered the storm in a classroom in Bagumbayan Elementary School along with more than 30 people ranging in age between one month and 82. “That’s why now we’re worried about it.”
The evacuation of so many people is an impressive step in disaster preparation here, Ms. Marshall said. “A million people evacuated — that’s pretty huge for a country like the Philippines,” she said. “Even so, we’re waiting to see what happens next. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/world/asia/as-typhoon-hagupit-hits-philippines-evacuees-express-relief.html?_r=0
"Disaster diplomacy at play in Haiyan aid response by China, United States"
By AUSTIN RAMZYDEC. 7, 2014
Homes damaged by Typhoon Hagupit in Tacloban in the central Philippines on Sunday.
Marlon Tano/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
LEGAZPI, the Philippines — As Typhoon Hagupit churned across the Philippines .. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/philippines/index.html?inline=nyt-geo .. on Sunday, residents of the eastern part of the island nation expressed relief that they had joined the hundreds of thousands who evacuated to safer ground.
Eleanor Llaneta, 60, decided to follow the advice of her neighborhood captain and leave her home in Albay Province, on the southeastern tip of Luzon Island, on Friday, more than a day before Typhoon Hagupit made landfall in the country.
In past years she might have considered staying put, but a year’s worth of news about the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan, which left more than 7,300 people dead or missing after hitting the Philippines in November 2013, convinced her that prudence was the best course.
“We only knew about storm surges after Tacloban,” said Ms. Llaneta, referring to the city that Haiyan left filled with mud, debris and dead bodies just over one year ago.
By late Sunday, two casualties had been reported, and what had been a classified as supertyphoon was far weaker than Haiyan was when it hit and was continuing to weaken. The storm, which is expected to push its way across the country until Wednesday, was generating strong winds and rain but the overall effect was not as devastating as worst-case scenarios had anticipated.
The government announced Sunday evening that two people were confirmed to have been killed by the storm, a one-year-old girl and a 65-year-old man who died of hypothermia in the central province of Iloilo.
In Albay Province, Ms. Llaneta and about 560,000 others were evacuated ahead of the storm’s arrival, according to local officials. As of 4 a.m. Sunday more than 1.2 million people were evacuated nationwide, Gwendolyn Pang, secretary general of the Philippine Red Cross, wrote on Facebook.
Hagupit is expected to hopscotch across islands as it makes its way west. Maximum sustained winds near the center had dropped to about 100 miles an hour by Sunday morning, but the slow churn over the nation could dump large amounts of rain, setting off floods and mudslides.
MAP
With full assessments of damaged areas far from finished, the government is not ready to publicly declare success in riding out the storm. Still, officials and aid workers sounded notes of optimism that darker predictions of the storm’s destructiveness would not materialize.
“The picture looks O.K. so far in the daylight,” said Kate Marshall, a spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. “But we still don’t know what happens when the typhoon moves northwest.”
Motorists made their way through fallen trees on Sunday after
Typhoon Hagupit hit Samar island in the Philippines.
Francis R. Malasig/European Pressphoto Agency
Nearly a day after Hagupit hit, Albay had yet to record a storm-related death or serious injury, said Jukes Nunez, an Albay special operations officer. “Disaster preparedness, we want to make it part of daily life, just like brushing your teeth,” said Mr. Nunez. “We are one of the most vulnerable areas in the Philippines.”
The Mayon Volcano rises over Albay, adding a further risk of landslides to the wind, floods and storm surges that often follow typhoons. In 2006, Typhoon Durian dumped heavy rain on the area, setting off mudslides that buried villages below Mayon and killing more than 1,000 people.
Residents in Legazpi, the Philippines, protect
themselves from the rain and heavy winds of Typhoon
Hagupit on Sunday. Aaron Favila/Associated Press
One significant development in disaster preparedness here is a much wider knowledge of the threat from storm surges, the walls of water pulled along by typhoons that can quickly flood low-lying coastal areas. In Tacloban last year a wall of water from Typhoon Haiyan ripped across a peninsular neighborhood known as San Jose, crumpling cement houses and causing a large number of deaths.
An assessment of that disaster by a German government-funded sustainable development agency said that many residents in Tacloban — where the storm surge was the cause of most of the fatalities — were not familiar with the risks and did not evacuate. “Serious warnings and more effective evacuations along the coastline could have saved many lives,” the report said.
Families prepare to return to their homes from an evacuation center in Legazpi,
the Philippines. Credit Jes Aznar for The New York Times
In the year since Haiyan, residents have been exposed to much more discussion about the risks of typhoons, and evacuees in the city of Legazpi say it has contributed to their willingness to leave their homes.
“We were hearing all of this news on the radio about storm surges,” said Maria Ampo, 46, who weathered the storm in a classroom in Bagumbayan Elementary School along with more than 30 people ranging in age between one month and 82. “That’s why now we’re worried about it.”
The evacuation of so many people is an impressive step in disaster preparation here, Ms. Marshall said. “A million people evacuated — that’s pretty huge for a country like the Philippines,” she said. “Even so, we’re waiting to see what happens next. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/world/asia/as-typhoon-hagupit-hits-philippines-evacuees-express-relief.html?_r=0
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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