Storm surge swept teacher out of the house

LIKE other families in their neighborhood in Palo, Leyte, Emma Elnido prepared for supertyphoon Yolanda.

The school teacher and her husband shopped for food supplies, leaving some in their car in case they needed to evacuate quickly.

They took their three children aged 6 to 11 years old and her 70-year-old mother Apolinaria Salintes to Tacloban city to stay with relatives, thinking that would be safer.

The storm surge after 6 a.m. caught them off guard.

When she and husband Elmer opened the bedroom door, seawater was already chest deep.

The teacher said she tried to hang on to the window grills of their bungalow but was swept outside by the strong current which smashed the house.

It happened so fast, all you could do was pray and hang on to anything you could reach, she said.

A hard object, probably a tree branch, hit her face while she swam. Elnida thought that was the end.

She was swept three houses away until she grabbed hold of the steel post of a neighbor’s water tank.

“I did not know where my husband was. I said to myself that maybe he was already gone,” Elnido said.

She lost consciousness. When she recovered a few minutes later, the water was knee-deep. She noticed the blood on the right side of her face and that her eye was swollen.

“But I did not mind the pain. I was too happy to see that my husband also survived,” she said.

The face cut received 11 stitches in the emergency room of Palo Hospital, the only part spared from storm damage.

To stave off hunger, they picked up hotdogs floating in the floodwater and fished out food from a refrigerator that floated their way.

She said neighbors slaughtered a dead cow for their food.

Later on Friday, Elnido said she and Elmer went to Tacloban city and were reunited with her mother and children, who were safe. Other relatives followed.

The teacher with two children and some relatives made it to the C-150 plane that airlifted evacuees to Cebu.

She is waiting for her husband, 11-year-old daughter Ezra and two more nieces who were left behind in Tacloban City.

Elnido said they will stay at the Tinago gym until the entire family reaches Cebu. Then they will proceed to Manila and start a new life. /Chief of Reporters Doris Bongcac