As the truck lumbers past the rubble-strewn remains of Tacloban City, onlookers pull shirts over their faces and use fingers to plug their noses. The truck is laden with death, 34 people killed by Typhoon Haiyan. Their decay, after five days in the heat and humidity, creates a stench that blankets the street as the truck passes by.
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This is a funeral procession, or what amounts to one in a place where unidentified bodies still lie on roadsides, their skin now sloughing off in decomposition.
The truck's trip, before it is interrupted by a report of attacking rebels, is the opening of a mass burial effort in a city overwhelmed.
"This is the very first truck," says Jay James Arroyo, who is with the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation. He is following the truck in a covered pickup, and has dabbed Vic's vapour rub under his nose to help mask the smell.
From the day Haiyan hit, the startling number of visible corpses has been among the most affecting symbols of the devastation caused by the typhoon, which the United Nations now estimates has affected 11.3 million people – nearly one in 10 in the Philippines.
But not until Wednesday has a major effort been mounted to clear them away in Tacloban. Crews lay rows of corpses on a plaza in front of a downtown shop overlooking the water that once sold souvenirs. By Wednesday morning, 185 had been brought here, a fraction of the official death toll, which stood at 1,688. They expect 600 to be buried in coming days.
"Right now the mayor wants all the bodies removed," says Emmanuel Aranas, a senior superintendent with the NBI. Not far from him, a single small hand sticks into the air out of one of the body bags. "The burial itself is only temporary. When the situation is better, then the government will conduct identification if they want to."
For now, not even the basics of identification are being carried out. No one knows, for example, how many of the 34 bodies on the truck are men, women or children.
And to underscore the fraught situation in Tacloban, the burial effort is halted in a flurry of screaming and running, when a report of gunshots sends the NBI agents and accompanying troops frantically seeking cover. The soldiers, most of them unarmed, say a local rebel group called the New People's Army has fired from a bridge ahead. The New People's Army, or NPA, is the militant wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. "There is information that some rebels will attack," one says. The soldiers are visibly scared. One crosses himself.
Nearby residents join the rush away, mothers clinging to babies. One man running with a toddler trips on downed power cables, and falls hard onto the concrete. The trucks are eventually turned around and race back to the souvenir shop, soldiers yelling "Alert! Alert!" as they return.
Derlie Capatoy was working at a warehouse when she heard gunfire. "All of a sudden armed people were going down from the mountains. They are trying to get the foods of the people," she said. Police and military forces urged flight, so she left to stay with family farther away. Such rebel activity is completely unknown in the area, she said.
Philippine authorities also reported Tuesday they had blocked a planned NPA attack on a relief convoy, killing two rebels and capturing one. Authorities have dispatched four armoured personnel carrier to Tacloban, where the threat of outside attack comes adds new tension to a population still barely able to get on with grieving its losses.
On Wednesday, Nelson Javier watched while funeral home personnel drove up in an old Mercedes hearse to pick up the bloated body of his aunt, who died when a floating shipping container landed on her new house and crushed it.
The workers from the Rolling Hills funeral home tied her hands together, wrapped her in blankets, placed her on a stretcher and slid her into the back of the hearse. It was barely 9 a.m. and she was their sixth body of the day. Jason Jandoc, one of the workers, was until recently a security guard, but was pressed into body collection. Rolling Hills, which charges $1,200 for the pickup and a funeral, is the only such operation still running; the rest were either destroyed by the flood, or have owners who have left town.
Today, Mr. Jandoc will work from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. "We have many, many bookings," he says. Doing the work "hurts," he says, as he drives past the rows of bodies still on the street. "Look at this."
The aid effort, meanwhile, has struggled to match the needs of the survivors begging for water and food. So far unable to bring in outside supplies, the United Nations World Food Programme on Wednesday was able to distribute some help after discovering a local warehouse that had not been looted. It contained 2,500 metric tonnes of rice, which the WFP bought and began to give away to a line of people hundreds deep at Tacloban's city hall.
Other WFP supplies have been stuck in Manila and Cebu, unable to secure space on military aircraft. On Tuesday, the military blocked movement of humanitarian goods as it sought to reorganize operations at the increasingly busy Tacloban airport, a UN official said.
"This is an access-based emergency. We're having huge problems getting access," said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, a regional civil military coordination officer with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The organizational logjam has exacted an acute toll on medical authorities. At Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Centre, Dr. Emmanuel Bueno, said no post-typhoon shipment of medical supplies has been able to get in. Medicine is stuck in Manila and Cebu City, a 30-minute flight away. There are, he says, "problems with transport" tied to "priorities, which are security and the transport of police and military.
The U.S. military said it is working to address some of the issues. The aircraft carrier USS George Washington is set to arrive Thursday. It will bring the capacity to produce 2.5-million litres per day of freshwater. U.S. Marines V-22 Osprey aircraft will also be used to carry supplies to far-off coastal villages where little is left, said Brig-Gen. Paul Kennedy.
"The wooden structures are all gone. Looks like a bomb went off," he said. "This is a mess."
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