Aquino: We could have acted faster on ‘Yolanda’

President Aquino: Apologetic. AP FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Four months after Super Typhoon Yolanda slammed into Eastern Visayas, killing more than 6,000 people, President Aquino acknowledged that the government’s post-disaster response could have been “faster.”

And for that, he apologized to a student from Tacloban City, one of the hardest hit localities, who is now studying at Hope Christian High School in Manila.

“I apologize if we couldn’t act even faster,” the President told Czar Agustine Yu, a former student at Sacred Heart High School in Tacloban City, during an open forum at his new school.

“Based on my own experience in Barangay 48 where I live, we did not receive any help from the government, no relief, no medical care, nothing,” Yu told Aquino.

“It took three days before help came. So why did it take a long time before the government helped the people of Tacloban during Typhoon Yolanda?” he asked.

As he had done in the past, the President pointed to the sheer “magnitude” of Yolanda, which was deemed the strongest typhoon to make landfall in history.

“The magnitude, I think, is unprecedented in our history,” he said, then went on to recall how the government had prepositioned relief items in areas expected to be lashed by the monster storm.

But many roads were blocked, isolating many areas in need of immediate assistance, the President said.

“Again, [it was] very massive. I guess you saw the devastation,” he told Yu.

“I’m sure that by 9 a.m. of the following day, Saturday, a C-130 was already landing at Tacloban airport. Now, that wasn’t an easy thing to do given that the airport, the terminal, the runway itself were hit very hard by Yolanda,” he said.

“The first thing they had to do was bring in Army troopers to clear the runway so that the C-130 could land. The C-130 [brought] in a radio communications van to be able to reestablish communication,” he added.

Maxin Fenoni Ong, another former Tacloban student now also studying at Hope Christian, asked Aquino about his statement criticizing the Tacloban City government in the wake of the disaster.

The President cited the local government’s failure to set aside, as supposedly promised, 34 hectares of land on which temporary houses could be built.

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