JOIN USTyphoon Haiyan which tore through the Philippines on Friday has left a trail of death and destruction in its wake. An estimated 10,000 people may have been killed by the super typhoon and millions are displaced.
Witnesses describe the destruction as unprecedented; entire towns have been flattened and streets are strewn with rotting corpses. Survivors in the worst-hit town of Tacloban say that the typhoon lifted a wall of water onto the island. So powerful was the storm surge that a ship ploughed into the town.
Rescue workers are hunting for survivors. Besides rushing food and water to them, aid workers must act quickly to remove the corpses as there is a danger of contamination triggering epidemics. The international community must respond generously to the Philippines in its hour of crisis. This is a country that is repeatedly battered by natural disasters and the havoc wrought by Haiyan is unprecedented.
Haiyan is among the strongest recorded typhoons to hit the Philippines. However, a high death toll was not inevitable. Modern technology has enabled us to predict typhoons and their intensity. Pro-active intervention by Filipino authorities could have reduced the death toll. Awareness of the impending typhoon was high and people were warned but this is not enough.
It should have been followed up with rapid evacuation of areas that were in Haiyan’s path. The importance of timely evacuation in keeping the death toll down was underscored only a month ago when India evacuated over a million people living in the path of Cyclone Phailin and kept the death toll to a minimum. Thus timely human intervention can limit the havoc unleashed by natural disasters. Filipino authorities failed in this regard.
Whether Typhoon Haiyan is the outcome of global warming is unclear as scientists say they do not have enough data on tropical storms to make this link. However, climate change manifests itself in a rise in frequency and ferocity of extreme weather events. A surge in super-storms such as Typhoon Haiyan points in this direction.
Climate scientists predict that the impact of climate change will be felt most deeply in low-lying areas, which are expected to go under water when sea-levels rise. The international community needs to put climate change on top of its agenda to prevent such deadly disasters from striking.