By
BODIES are still being found under the wreckage almost four months after super typhoon Yolanda ravaged the Philippines as survivors struggle to rebuild their lives, a top UN aid official said Thursday.
The government’s confirmed death toll of 6,201 has not been updated for a month, as officials investigate whether the recently-discovered corpses are among the 1,785 listed as missing.
and humanitarian aid chief Valerie Amos listens
intently to a journalist who asked how she
assessed the situation of typhoon Yolanda
victims after her visit on Wednesday.
The UN official appealed for more help to
the survivors. DANNY PATA
UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs Valerie Amos recounted the shock of discovering the dead during a visit Wednesday to the devastated central city of Tacloban.
“As the debris is cleared, they are finding more dead bodies. We experienced that for ourselves,” she told reporters.
Amos visited Tacloban to inspect the progress of the UN-aided rehabilitation effort and check on the condition of survivors of one of the strongest typhoons ever to hit land.
The government’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council confirmed bodies are still being found.
“Sometimes they find two or three a day, then there are days where they find none,” the council’s spokesman Reynaldo Balido said.
The latest casualty figures were a month old and did not reflect any subsequent corpse retrievals as the authorities work to reconcile the numbers, he added.
Balido said residents have learnt to adapt to the sight of newly found corpses.
Yolanda raked across the central Philippines on November 8 last year, wrecking 1.1 million houses and displacing more than 4 million residents of some of the country’s poorest provinces according to the UN.
The worst damage was inflicted by huge tsunami-like surges of seawater into Tacloban and other coastal communities.
Amos said Tacloban survivors need more help.
“They are many people trying to live in their original (ruined) homes. They put up a tarpaulin as a roof and put some wood on the side and that’s not good enough. It won’t stand up to a storm,” she said.
The UN was also concerned about the welfare of more than a million farmers after 30 million coconut trees were destroyed, she said.
Replacement trees will not bear fruit for another six to eight years, Amos said.
About 30,000 small fishing boats were also destroyed or damaged, she added.
To help these people, the UN asked aid donors for $788 million in December, but Amos said only just over $362 million has been raised.
“Signs of devastation are still evident but so too are signs of progress,” she added.
Permanent housing and restoration of livelihood remain the greatest concerns, Amos said.
“If you look at other situations where this kind of natural disaster has happened, the recovery efforts can take a long time. Our focus has for to be on how can we support our people over the next few months as those longer term recovery efforts bear fruit,” Amos told a press conference Thursday.
The UN partner agencies and even the private sector have made possible the building of temporary shelters in the areas affected, Amos said.
“I looked at a home that Catholic relief services for example, have developed. It has a five-year life span which could be a bridge between what people have now and when the longer term housing solutions are put in place,” she said.
Providing permanent shelter, she said may take a long process since the government must consider several factors such as land rights, the location of the new homes and the local government must consult with the communities.
She also said that most people do not want to move particularly if their livelihoods are associated with being very close to the shoreline, which is dangerous.
“All of those process take time. So what we are focusing on is that while that consultation takes place that we are able to have solutions for people who bridged the gap between what happens in the longer term and what people have now,” she said.
Aside from the contributions made by the international community to the UN appeal, Amos also noted that “considerable resources” have been committed to help Yolanda survivors.
She noted that a trust fund, in partnership with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, may be set up for the restoration of the affected areas.
Amos said donor nations would have to discuss first the best and most secure way of creating the trust fund and coursing the said funds to the programs.
On Thusday, the US government on Thursday turned over 1,500 metric tons of rice to the victims of ryphoon Yolanda.
In a statement, US ambassador to Manila Philip Goldberg said the donation is part of its continuing commitment to support the Philippine government’s post-Yolanda relief and reconstruction.
The donation was turned over to the Department of Social Welfare and Development and the World Food Program.
“This assistance signifies once again the commitment of the American people to partner with Filipinos in rebuilding the lives of so many affected by Typhoon Yolanda,” he added.
The assistance is a part of the 5,000 metric tons of rice—enough to help feed 500,000 people for one month—that was announced by US Secretary of State John Kerry during his visit to Tacloban in December 2013.
The remainder of the rice assistance is expected to arrive in March. With Sara Susanne D. Fabunan and AFP
No comments:
Post a Comment