Running around the bushes... ug dili kaya ug dili pud under control... pwede man mo ingun ug mangayo ug tabang sa laing nasud woi... PILA RAY PAGSULTI PLEASE HELP US UN/US or other countries dili gyud namu kaya ang LOGISTICS nangamatay ang pulis ug naa sa gobyerno biktima.... ayaw na pa UNDER CONTROL PNOY administration woi... willing na mo help ang uban nasud and beside kabalo napud sila unsa ka INCOMPETENT UG CORRUPT ATO GOVERNMENT woi.. Transcript of the CNN interview with Secretary Mar Roxas: On government efforts in the wake of typhoon Yolanda [November 14, 2013] ANDREW STEVENS: Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for joining us. I have been walking around this town for four or five days. You and I are both here. SECRETARY MAR ROXAS: That’s right. You are here from the storm itself. STEVENS: I am hearing growing hunger on the streets about the government response. People are feeling like they are being left, they have not been supported by the government. SEC. ROXAS: Well through your network, I can assure our people and the whole world that the entire force of our government of President PNoy is looking after our people here. You know, if we had set aside gallons or pales of water, it just turns out that need is that of a swimming pool. So what was a garden hose is now a fire truck’s hose and we are doubling this everyday. And this should now accelerate as days go by. STEVENS: So obviously, you couldn’t handle the initial response. But even today, we are now on the sixth day, we are at the airport, we are the staging post for relief supplies, I get asked for water. My crew gets asked for water everyday, several times a day. If you can’t supply water here… SEC. ROXAS: There’s no municipal water supply. All the water that is available are in bottles that are brought in. This is brought to the warehouse of the Social Welfare Department from which it now goes to all the communities from the interior. This, what you see here is multiplied a thousand times by all the other localities inside. STEVENS: Is the situation under control? SEC. ROXAS Yes, I would say that it is. STEVENS: Are you saying that the relief efforts are now working as effectively and as efficiently as they could be? SEC. ROXAS: You know, Andrew, nothing is fast enough in a situation like this. The point is everything that we have, if this is a gun, all bullets are being deployed, if this is a fire hose, all hoses are being deployed. And slowly, as we are clearing the streets, we are able to reach the people in the interior. Imagine a situation where from zero, no power, light, water, communication—nothing, you have to build the social infrastructure as well as the physical infrastructure from 275,000 families. STEVENS: But this is immediate response. Surely you knew the storm was coming, we all knew the storm was coming. We knew it was going to be perhaps one of the most intense storms we’ve ever seen. The president said on the day before the storm arrived that Manila stood by, ready to support everyone. From my view, that didn’t happen quickly enough. ROXAS: Well, as I said, nothing is fast enough in a situation like this. In our doctrine or in our framework, the local government unit is the first responder. The national government is supposed to come in on Day 2, Day 3 to be able to support that. What happened is that the local government unit, not just here in Tacloban but also in many communities in Leyte, basically, was literally swept away. So there was… STEVENS: But there was emphasis for central government to provide immediate resistance. SEC. ROXAS: That;s right. That’s why on Day 1, on zero plus Day 1, we were able to open the airport. On Day 2, we opened the roads to the airport. And now here we are, Day 6, all the municipalities are now accessible by land. STEVENS: I travel to the city everyday. I have been. Everyday, I have been passing the same bodies on the street. What I want to know is you are trying to reassure the people. The people are living wherever they can. They are still living next to these decomposing corpses. SEC. ROXAS: Let me just correct that, they are not the same bodies. Everyday, we pick up the bodies. I, myself, led a pickup, a cadaver recovery team yesterday and the day before so… STEVENS: With due respect, I see the same ones. SEC. ROXAS: They may look like they are the same because they are in the same looking body bags. The point is what’s happening is as we pick up along the main road, all of the bodies in the interior are then brought out. So the next team, there’s two rounds everyday, the next team then goes and picks it up. Last night, when I left here the airport, at around 11 or midnight, as I was going out, there’s another batch of bodies, which are now being picked up again by the same cadaver recovery team. STEVENS: When will the roads be cleared? When will the stench of death actually stopped being apparent in the city, next to major staging post. There are still what I can say are about 20 to 30 bodies just nearby. SEC. ROXAS: Well, you know Andrew, let me give you our situation. Right now, we have 20 trucks operating, We split that in half. One half is at food delivery, one half of that is in clearing the streets, and a quarter, meaning one half of that one half is in cadaver recovery. That’s what we have. By tonight, another ten trucks are supposed to arrive and then after that, those organized by the private sector is also coming in to help us. So every asset, moving asset, physical asset that is being brought here, genset, etc. are being deployed as fast as we can to where it’s needed and that’s all we can do. Stevens: What is the death toll now and what do you expect it to be having been a part of this devastation? SEC. ROXAS: It’s going to be horrific, Andrew. The actual number reported by the Office of Civil Defense as of last night is 1,668. But that’s, I think, understated because there are still many towns that have not sent in complete reports. And out of the 40 towns of Leyte, for example, only 20 have been contacted. So there’s another 20 towns with no communication. Now that the roads have been opened… STEVENS: How much are we talking about there in 20 towns, roughly how many hundreds of thousands of people? SEC. ROXAS: The population of the entire Leyte province is about a million and a half. About three to four hundred thousand of that is in Tacloban, the big city, including Palo. The rest of it is spread out on the other areas. STEVENS: Okay, so horrific… SEC. ROXAS: It’s going to be be a high death toll. I don’t wanna go into just throwing out numbers. It’s gonna be high but what I can do, and I wanna take this opportunity and ask help from the rest of the world. We appreciate all the help that has come in, but what we need right now are medicines for community-borne diseases like leptospirosis, anti-typhoid medicine, anti-tetanus medicine, and that sort of thing. We don’t need so much doctors, although we appreciate all the doctors, nurses that have come here. But we have the medical personnel. It’s the supplies, bandages, trauma kits, hygiene kits, tents. All of the homes, you can see all the first 4 kilometers down the coast, every home for a kilometer and a half deep down the coast have just been swept away. So we’re gonna need tents. We’re gonna need gensets to be able to power up the government offices, the hospitals, the water-pumping stations, those are the kind we need. STEVENS: Are you saying the international community has not responded as generously as it should be? Roxas: No, we’re very, very grateful for all the help that has come in, even countries that normally don’t respond, that we don’t see like Canada or Israel, the others are here and we appreciate this very much. All I’m trying to do is if you’re going to send help, I’m trying to match the help that’s coming in with what I see on the ground is the need. STEVENS: Let me tell you a story I heard yesterday from the mayor of this city. He said that we ordered and asked for 700 body bags from the central authorities in Manila. Evidently, these body bags in Manila never turned up here. No one knows where they are. My question to you is, is there an effective chain of command here? Is there a coordination? Do you think that you have the right structure in place to deal with this? Because, again from what I’m seeing, it seems to be uncoordinated. It doesn’t seem to be working nearly efficiently enough. ROXAS: Again, as I’ve said, every effort, there’s nothing as big or nothing as fast in a situation like this. It’s chaotic. There are no baggage tags. All the supplies just come in in unmarked boxes. So, yes it’s very easy for 700 body bags –I don’t even know about that— to get lost. Nonetheless, as of yesterday, I know that the army and the local city already has 500 body bags that they’re deploying. So those body bags are gonna be found and we’re gonna need more. And there’s more that’s coming in from the central office. STEVENS: Do you think martial law should be declared here? I know curfew is now in place. ROXAS: Well, even the curfew, you know the curfew is de facto, not de jure. Because the city council cannot get a quorum because they themselves are victims. STEVENS: But surely you need to override bureaucracy in the light of this situation. ROXAS: No, which is why it is de facto. It’s in place even if there is no technical paper legalizing it. It is de facto. The PNP is enforcing it. We have brought in 1,000 additional PNP from outside of Leyte and Tacloban to be able to augment the forces here. I’ll give you an example, Andrew. Tacloban police station has manpower of 293. On Day 1, that is Saturday, only 20 showed up. They’re all victims. They’re swept away. They’re victims themselves. Their houses were swept away. They’re looking for their loved ones. Today, as of last night, the count is 50. So that’s why people from the outside had to be brought in. STEVENS: Alright. So we’re gonna have to leave it there.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 14:36:01 +0000
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