Tower and Town, August 2016

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Tacloban

Joshua recently travelled to The Philippines with his friend Will Hewitt to help him make a film about a Beatles tribute band (!) who had survived a typhoon and gone from strength to strength. He found the experiences of the people he met and their resilience very striking and wrote this article in response.

On the 8th of November 2013 the city of Tacloban in the Philippines prepared itself for yet another tropical storm. This was typhoon season after all. Via the Internet, national news channels and local government officials, the news had spread that this typhoon was to be a particularly bad one. Residents of the more vulnerable, low-lying areas of the city were told to make for higher ground and wait for the typhoon to pass. Some people did. Many did not, believing that because they had survived many storms before, they would survive this one just the same. Little did they know that this would turn out to be one of the largest tropical storms ever recorded.

The typhoon was given the name Yolanda. A rather sweet name for such a disastrous event.

Yolanda was thousands of miles wide, with winds reaching up to 195 mph. Yolanda battered Tacloban for hours ripping apart houses, schools, supermarkets and hospitals. More destructive than the wind was the water. Yolanda lifted a great wall of water and forced it on to the land. Caught in the wave were 5 cargo ships. Like colossal torpedoes the ships tore through the already battered buildings along the coast.

Tacloban woke to 6000 dead and thousands more homeless, no power, no idea of where to find food and great swathes of the city still up to 13 feet underwater.

Today Tacloban shows very few obvious scars from Yolanda. Thanks largely to a significant global relief effort, including a ship from South Korea full of pickled cabbage, the city turned quickly to relative normality

There are some reminders. The prow of one of those fateful cargo ships remains some 150 m inland as a monument to those lost during Yolanda.

The memories of that time remain firmly in the minds of the people. Each person has his or her own story of that night. Fear remains, fear of finding bodies in the ocean or washed up on the beach and the quiet fear that come the next typhoon season it could happen again.

Joshua Bumphrey