Summary
11 November 2013
Officials estimate up to 10,000 people have died in Tacloban city and elsewhere in the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. Many other people are now struggling to survive without food, shelter or clean drinking water.
Reporter:
Jon Donnison
This aerial photo shows destroyed houses in Tacloban, in the Philippines
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Report
Tacloban has been flattened. Driving down the main high street, hardly a single building is left standing. People say this town was hit by a wall of water when the typhoon struck on Friday.
There's the stench of rotting corpses. Driving in from the airport we saw scores of bodies lying by the roadside. For three days they have been there – nobody to bury them. People are desperate for food, clean water and shelter. At the badly battered airport, a makeshift hospital has been set up. We saw two young women giving birth, laid out among the debris.
Aid is getting in, but slowly and this is just one town in one province. Nobody knows the full extent of the devastation elsewhere.
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Vocabulary
- flattened
completely destroyed
- struck
hit
- stench
very bad smell, especially of decay
- scores
many / measured in sets of twenty
- shelter
temporary place where someone can live
- battered
hit or badly damaged
- makeshift
made quickly using whatever materials are available
- debris
the broken pieces of something larger that has been destroyed
