More ‘Yolanda’ bodies found

By: Marlon Ramos - 11 years ago

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

Five months after Supertyphoon “Yolanda” leveled large swathes of the Eastern Visayas, dead bodies continue to turn up.

Seven bodies were recovered in Tacloban City over the weekend as government workers scoured the area for victims of one of the most destructive typhoons to hit the country, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said Tuesday.

The NDRRMC said the death toll from Yolanda now stood at exactly 6,300, most of them still unidentified, while the typhoon left almost P89.6 billion worth of property and infrastructure damage.

It said 1,061 persons remain missing and a total of 28,689 were injured in different typhoon-related incidents.

The typhoon, which made landfall six times before leaving the Philippine area of responsibility, affected some 3.4 million families composed of 16 million individuals in nine regions.

The NDRRMC said Yolanda, which triggered storm surges several meters high, displaced four million individuals as it knocked down one million houses.

The agriculture sec-tor bore the brunt of the typhoon’s wrath, with P21.8 billion worth of agricultural crops destroyed.

The unimaginable destruction wrought by Yolanda prompted President Aquino to create the Office of the Presidential Assistant for Rehabilitation and Recovery headed by a former senator, Panfilo Lacson.

The government has admitted that much still needs to be done to ensure the recovery of the typhoon-ravaged communities, focusing first on the construction of temporary shelters for displaced residents.

The Aquino administration has earmarked billions of pesos to fund various rehabilitation projects.

Two weeks ago, Interior Secretary Mar Roxas led a whirlwind inspection of typhoon-stricken areas in Leyte and Capiz provinces, distributing more than P1 billion in financial aid to local government units.

Roxas also disclosed that the government has set aside close to P4 billion to fund various projects in all towns and cities, not just the victims of Yolanda, under the Aquino administration’s Grassroots Participatory Budget Process.

Meanwhile, Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman is not ruling out the possibility that some women victims of the supertyphoon may have resorted to prostitution in the evacuation centers in Samar and Leyte for their daily subsistence though she said there is as yet no evidence to prove this.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday, Soliman said a team from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) was still gathering data on the media reports of prostitution in the evacuation centers in those provinces as well as in Zamboanga City.

Soliman said the DSWD had no evidence yet as far as the evacuation centers in Leyte and Samar are concerned. With a report from Cynthia D. Balana