Noy: 10,000 death toll overstated

MANILA, Philippines - The 10,000-death toll reported worldwide after Super Typhoon Yolanda struck Eastern Visayas “is too much,” President Aquino said yesterday.

Based on government figures, Aquino said the number of casualties was only at around 2,000 to 2,500.

“(That is) the figure we are working on as far as deaths are concerned,” Aquino told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour late Tuesday.

He said local officials could have overstated the death toll because “they were too close to the incident.”

“There was emotional trauma involved with that particular estimate, quoting both a police official and a local government official… They did not have basis for it,” Aquino said.

The government has been overwhelmed by the typhoon, which flattened Tacloban, coastal capital of Leyte province where several local officials have said they feared 10,000 people died, many drowning in a tsunami-like surge of seawater.

Rescue workers have yet to reach scores of other towns and villages in the path of one of the strongest storms on record, five days after it smashed into the Visayas region last Friday.

Aquino, who has been on the defensive over his handling of the disaster, said the government was still gathering information from various storm-struck areas and the death toll may rise.

“We’re hoping to be able to contact something like 29 municipalities left wherein we still have to establish their numbers, especially for the missing,” he said.

On Sunday, two days after the typhoon, a regional police official told reporters that the death toll was estimated at 10,000, based on reports from local village chiefs collected by the governor. The same day, the mayor of Tacloban City estimated that 10,000 could have died in his city alone.

The National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) yesterday updated its death toll at 2,344, and the number of injured at 3,804.

That figure is an actual body count from affected regions and has been steadily increasing since day one of the disaster.

Some aid workers also expressed skepticism at Aquino’s dramatically lower death toll.

“Probably it will be higher because numbers are just coming in. Many of the areas we cannot access,” said Gwendolyn Pang, secretary-general of the Philippine Red Cross.

The preliminary number of missing, according to the Red Cross, is 22,000. Pang cautioned that the figure could include people who have since been located.

“They report their relatives missing but they don’t alert us when they are found,” she said.

There was difficulty and confusion in obtaining the exact number of fatalities.Downed communication lines and power make it impossible to get up-to-date information.

Another factor is the shattered local administrations that are unable to work to full capacity and villagers burying their dead immediately or bodies being sucked out to sea and not being counted.

Similar factors were cited in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, where in some instances separate government departments in Indonesia were giving out significantly different figures, each unconcerned about the confusion this created.

The National Grid Corp. of the Philippines said it would take five to six weeks to fully restore power in the areas hit by the monster typhoon.

Telecommunication providers Smart, Globe and Sun Cellular said they were able to restore communications in Tacloban City and other parts of Leyte.

Unprecedented disaster

More than 670,000 people have been displaced by the typhoon and many have no access to food, water or medicine, the United Nations said.

With international aid efforts picking up, relief supplies have begun trickling into Tacloban along roads flanked with corpses and canyons of debris.

Natasha Reyes, emergency coordinator in the Philippines of Médecins Sans Frontières, described the devastation as unprecedented for the disaster-prone archipelago.

“There are hundreds of other towns and villages stretched over thousands of kilometers that were in the path of the typhoon and with which all communication has been cut,” Reyes said.

UN aid chief Valerie Amos, who is in the Philippines, called the scale of destruction “shocking.”

Aquino has declared a state of national calamity and deployed hundreds of soldiers to control looting in Tacloban, a once-vibrant port city of 220,000 that is now a wasteland. –  With Delon Porcalla, Evelyn Macairan, Sheila Crisostomo, Jess Diaz, Paolo Romero, Czeriza Valencia, Louella Desiderio, Rudy Santos, Lawrence Agcaoili, Jennifer Rendon, Mike Frialde, Raymund Catindig AP