Evacuees arriving in Manila, Cebu from Tacloban need help—Belmonte

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Support services are being set up in Manila and Cebu for people escaping the devastation and misery left by Supertyphoon Yolanda in Tacloban City.

Speaker Feliciano Belmonte said he has directed the House of Representatives’ medical team and other employees to station themselves at Villamor Air Base to provide help to evacuees arriving on military C-130 aircraft.

Food and water would also be on standy for the exhausted survivors, Belmonte told reporters.

A similar set-up would be made at the Mactan airport in Cebu, where the Leyte residents are being flown to.

Former lawmaker Florencio Noel of the party-list group An Waray said there was a need to look after the survivors arriving in Manila or Cebu as nobody had attended to their needs for the last five days since Yolanda, the world’s strongest storm this year, flattened the city last Friday.

“They said they left Leyte hungry and arrived here hungry,” Noel said in a phone interview. He noted most of these people have relatives in Manila and Cebu and planned to live with them in the meantime.

Nonetheless, he said, it was necessary to give them immediate aid upon landing.

Noel said some educational institutions have offered to help the survivors with stress debriefing. The House’s medical team would take the survivors’ blood pressure, give first aid, and provide medicine.

Residents of Tacloban, one of the cities hardest hit by the  supertyphoon, jostling for limited space aboard C-130 airplanes. The city was flattened by Yolanda’s high winds and giant waves that struck with tsunami force. The city has been without electricity and very little potable water and food. Desperate residents have taken to looting stores and warehouses.

But Noel, himself a native of Tacloban, and Belmonte said they believed the exodus would be temporary. Residents are leaving now because of the security issue and lack of necessities, but once the situation is back to normal, they will want to return, Noel and Belmonte said.

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