Typhoon Haiyan, a Decade Later
Much has changed since the Super Typhoon Haiyan, known locally in the Philippines as Yolanda, devastated the Philippines 10 years ago. One of the most powerful storms in recorded history, its impacts are still present in the island nation, as well as in the minds of those who responded to it. Today, we remember what happened and how we worked hand-in-hand with affected communities to help them recover.
“Echoing silence.”
Those are the words Ben Hemingway, USAID Regional Director for East Asia and the Pacific, used to describe the response he got when trying to make contact with humanitarian colleagues in Tacloban city in the immediate aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan making landfall in November 2013. He had arrived in Manila days earlier from Bangkok, Thailand, where he was based at the time.
That silence was in direct contrast to the super typhoon that had just crashed into the city with nearly 200 mile-per-hour winds and waves strong enough to slam massive ships on top of buildings.
It was another day-and-a-half before Hemingway and Nancy Ebuenga, USAID Philippines Program Development Specialist, were able to make it to Tacloban. They were among the first international responders to reach the devastated city, and the scene that greeted them was unfathomable.
“No buildings. Infrastructure gone. Even roads seemed to have been erased by either debris from the storm surge or by the homes and buildings that collapsed around them. It was hard to even trace where roads would have been. There was just an absence,” Hemingway said.
USAID Responds
To this day, a decade later, Super Typhoon Haiyan remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in the history of the Philippines. More than 6,000 people were killed and 4.1 million displaced.
USAID’s response was swift. In addition to Hemingway and Ebuenga, USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance deployed a Disaster Assistance Response Team, commonly known as a DART, to lead the U.S. government’s robust response that included support from the U.S. Department of Defense and other U.S. government agencies.
Over the course of the response, the United States provided approximately $143 million in humanitarian and development assistance, including providing critical food, health, protection, and shelter assistance, as well as water, sanitation, and hygiene support. The U.S. military supported USAID’s response by airlifting critical relief supplies to communities cut off by the storm. In addition, coordination between the U.S. military and the Philippine Air Force enabled Tacloban Airport to reopen after sustaining severe damage, allowing the rest of the world to help provide support.
The response, lessons learned from it, and 10 years of humanitarian and resilience programming have since left the Philippines more prepared and better equipped to respond to a disaster of a similar magnitude.
Building Back Safer
Shelter was one of the immediate priorities of USAID’s response, with more than a million homes damaged or destroyed during the storm. It has remained a cornerstone effort to prevent death and destruction during future disasters.
Chuck Setchell, USAID Senior Shelter and Settlements Advisor, recently arrived home from a trip to the Philippines. He’s been to the country many times. The first was as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1976. He returned as a member of the Typhoon Haiyan USAID DART, arriving at Tacloban’s recently reopened airport shortly after the storm hit.
In the immediate aftermath of the storm transitional shelters projects were implemented.
“We needed to get a roof over people’s heads as soon as possible,” Setchell recalled, “but we also wanted to provide safe shelter, and help people make their communities safer than before.”
On his recent trip he spoke with USAID partners Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and Plan International and was able to conduct a site visit to reconstruction projects supported by other U.S. agencies. There are now more permanent shelters that families are now living in, including one- and two-story homes that were built to better withstand storms and in neighborhoods that are further from the low-lying coast and less susceptible to storm surge. Other measures, like solar lighting and improved and safer walkways, provide an additional layer of safety that wasn’t there before.
“These are safer shelters in safer settlements,” Setchell said.
A New Way of Responding
Lessons learned from Haiyan have also led to a shift in the way Philippine authorities prepare for disasters. With help from USAID, the country has scaled up their investment in a robust response framework that includes prepositioning of supplies and early warning systems.
“One of our goals is to help build more response readiness capacity connecting the national level capabilities with the first responder needs of the affected communities,” Hemingway explained.
“For example, having logistics capabilities on standby to quickly secure trucks, planes, and boats to move commodities across the archipelago that is the Philippines is something that is core to the Philippine government’s response framework. Having more pre-positioning and warehouse capabilities across the country is something that was started by USAID through the U.N. and some of our NGO partners. Now most of that work is transitioned over to the government of Philippines owned warehouse facilities with their own commodities.”
These efforts were put to the test after Super Typhoon Rai — known locally as Odette — struck in December 2021. The Philippine government response efforts, along with local partners, were literally able to help communities weather the storm themselves. And as a result of improved preparedness efforts, USAID did not need to deploy a DART following the typhoon despite the severity of the storm.
To Be Strong
The word resilient is often used when talking about the Philippines. Much of the work USAID has done to help people recover from Haiyan and prepare for future disasters is labeled “resilience” programming, and the Filipino people themselves are often said to be “resilient,” having persevered through volcanic eruptions, typhoons, earthquakes and more in recent years. In total, USAID has responded to more than 50 disasters in the Philippines since 1990.
But USAID Philippines’ Nancy Ebuenga, a proud Filipino, thinks another word is more appropriate.
“Filipinos are matatag,” she explained. “Matatag means to be strong. Strong in the face of difficulty and in the face of losing everything and starting over. I think the reason Filipinos are matatag is because they know they can rely on their families and they can rely on their neighbors… It’s those tight-knit relationships you have that makes you strong.”
Ten years after Haiyan, USAID remembers the lives lost and upended by this catastrophe and reaffirms our commitment to work to harness that matatag spirit of community in the Philippines in years to come.
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