Why 'Yolanda' was so deadly

When the Supertyphon "Yolanda" (International name: Haiyan) hit on November 8, 2013, it was the worst storm for the Philippines, with 7,350 dead and missing.

This staggering toll was caused by several factors:

With gusts exceeding 305 kilometers at the time of first landing, Yolanda was the strongest to date.

Typhoons usually reach their top speed while crossing oceans.

The mighty front has resulted in a giant sea wall called a storm surge, estimated at 7.5 meters high, in coastal areas such as Tacloban, a town of 240,000 inhabitants.

Overall, Yolanda tore up in a group of islands with a combined size area of ​​Portugal.

Low islands

The Philippines is the first major land mass in the typhoon belt of the Pacific Ocean.

A wall of mountains on the coast of the main island of Luzon alleviates some of the blows, but the smaller, flatter islands, such as those on Yolanda Road, are more exposed.

Much of Tacloban is less than 5 m above sea level.

The city and other people nearby were helpless in the face of the storm surging through a shallow bay sandwiched between the islands of Leyte and Samar.

Inadequate warnings

Although the hardest-hit areas received early warning, the weather service and other officials later admitted that the victims did not know the term "storm surge".

The last wave of deadly storm in Tacloban hit in 1887, more than a century before Yolanda.

In a country with many regional languages, the government also did not have local terms to communicate the phenomenon to everyone.

After the disaster, the government agency worked with linguists to develop simpler meteorological terms, so that everyone fully understands the danger of typhoons, floods, landslides and other adverse events.

Extreme poverty

In a country where one in five earns less than 100 pesos a day, people on the way to Yolanda have distinguished themselves by their extreme poverty.

Many victims built their homes in the narrow coastal plains of the island and lived off fishing and subsistence farming.

Yolanda destroyed or damaged 1.14 million houses, many of which were built with cheap and fragile materials that have no chance against the wrath of nature.

Failure to evacuate

The national government, through a geographic risk mapping program set up in 2006, had reported most areas prone to natural disasters.

But local governments have failed to evacuate much of the vulnerable population from the danger zones, partly because they have not fully understood the threat and partly because they have not fully understood the threat. they had not built enough shelters.

In the town of Hernani, on Samar Island, where Yolanda created the first of many landings, several families were wiped out by a storm surge when they left their fragile huts to face the storm in a low school built on along the neighboring coast have said.

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