UN DISASTER ASSESSMENT TEAM STUNNED BY YOLANDA-WROUGHT DEVASTATION IN TACLOBAN (GMA News, November 9, 2013) A United Nations Disaster Assessment Coordination (UNDAC) team arrived this morning in Tacloban City. Even such a hardened team of humanitarian workers were shocked upon witnessing the scenes of total devastation in the city where Typhoon Haiyan (locally known as Yolanda) first struck. The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of the UNDAC team, who further described the scene he saw in Tacloban City as an “unprecedented level of destruction.” Said Stampa, “This is destruction on a massive scale. There are cars thrown like tumble weed and the streets are strewn with debris. The UNDAC team arrived in Tacloban to prepare the ground work for an inter-agency humanitarian assessment. The roads between the airport and the town are completely blocked and relief operations will be extremely difficult, he said Helicopter is the only means of travel at the moment, as roads are impassable from the airport to the town.Trees and telephone poleslie unmoved across many roads. Even motorcyclists are avoiding the roads, and one can see many people here walking aimlessly, in search of food, or a place to lay their dead if only temporarily. – VC, GMA News (L-R): UNDAC team head Sebastian Rhodes Stampa; whole communities in Tacloban Leyte under water (middle) or rammed by the category 5 super typhoon (extreme right)
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 00:54:30 +0000
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