Lack of body bags, tools slow down ‘Yolanda’ search
Photo of the cadavers in body bags. Kristine Angeli Sabillo/INQUIRER.net
TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines – Six body bags and mounds of debris littered one street in San Jose, Tacloban on Saturday.
Fifteen days after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” (international codename: Haiyan) ravaged Eastern Visayas and nearby provinces, dead bodies were still being unearthed by authorities and residents, especially in the neighborhood of San Jose. Here, the stench of death persists.
Residents said the six bodies, supposedly children, were retrieved by the local Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) on Friday and were left there after they ran out of body bags. They said dozens of corpses were still lying around in the community.
The coastal area of San Jose was among the worst-hit by storm surges caused by Yolanda last November 8. Water reached as high as two-storey buildings, destroying houses made of light material and drowning thousands of people.
Authorities said more bodies are expected to surface.
Photo of the cadavers in body bags. Kristine Angeli Sabillo/INQUIRER.net
Tacloban City Mayor Alfred Romualdez said they would recover around 70 bodies per day.
“At the rate they’re going it’s probably going to take months. I hope that can be hastened. But there’s some equipment which we lack. The national government spearheads the retrieval,” he told INQUIRER.net.
Romualdez said there was difficulty retrieving bodies buried under heavy debris.
“That’s why the process is slow. We need equipment for that, at the moment we don’t,” he said.
Chief Inspector Rodrigo Almadin of the Tacloban City Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) said they were now conducting foot patrol to find missing bodies.
“Most of the cadavers are no longer easily spotted. They are under debris. We thoroughly search the areas with the help of foreign groups with K9 dogs,” he said.
Almadin admitted that they have not even reached some of their target areas because of the tedious work they were doing.
While the BFP has been tasked to find the bodies and put them in cadaver bags, the Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) were the ones supposed to pick them up and identify them.
Almadin said it was possible that their people ran out of bags and left the six bodies in San Jose for the SOCO to pick up.
“They will most likely retrieve them today,” he said.
Once BFP personnel find the bodies, they report it to the SOCO, which goes around the city with dump trucks. The cadaver bags are then marked and transported to the grave sites. It is there that the long process of identification is carried out.
For some of the residents of San Jose, they’ve become used to the smell and presence of dead bodies in the area.
Dionisio Ramirez built his makeshift shelter meters away from his old house, which is now swamped in flood water and debris. Two of the body bags lie nearby.
“Some of the residents cannot bear the smell, others are used to it. You can’t do anything about the smell anyway,” he said in Filipino.
Meanwhile, others passing by told INQUIRER.net that they hoped the government would speed up the retrieval process.
Almadin said some residents have started asking them for cadaver bags, taking it upon themselves to recover the dead.
As of Saturday, almost 1,500 bodies were found by Task Force Cadaver, composed of the BFP and other groups, in the city. Many are still missing while others were buried by relatives without informing the authorities.
Almadin said the number of discovered bodies per day had gone down from 780 last November 16 to 77 on Thursday.
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