10,000 feared dead after typhoon hits central Philippines

PanARMENIAN.Net - Rescue workers struggled to reach ravaged towns and villages in the central Philippines on Monday, November 11 while soldiers tried to quell looting in the chaotic aftermath of a powerful typhoon that killed an estimated 10,000 people and displaced more than 600,000, Reuters reported.

The United Nations said some survivors had no food, water or medicine, and that local officials had reported a mass grave of 300-500 bodies in the devastated city of Tacloban. Relief operations were hampered because roads, airports and bridges had been destroyed or were covered in wreckage, it said.

Threatening to worsen the crisis in the impoverished area, a tropical depression carrying heavy rain was forecast to arrive in the region early on Tuesday.

President Benigno Aquino, facing one of the biggest challenges of his three-year rule, deployed soldiers to Tacloban to restore order and said he might impose martial law or a state of emergency.

But three days after it was hit by one of the strongest typhoons on record, the city of 220,000 residents was still relying almost entirely for supplies and evacuation on just three military transport planes flying from nearby Cebu city.

"I lost my house, I lost everything. I want to get out. My food supply will run out in two days," said Maria Elnos, a nurse at Tacloban's one main hospital, who was among hundreds pleading unsuccessfully to get on a military C-130 plane late on Sunday.

Super typhoon Haiyan is estimated to have destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of structures in its path as it tore into the coastal provinces of Leyte and Samar on Friday. Most of the damage and deaths were caused by huge waves that inundated towns and swept away coastal villages in scenes that officials likened to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.