One of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded now appears to have devastated cities, towns and fishing villages with heavy loss of life when it played a deadly form of hopscotch across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday.
Barreling across palm-fringed beaches and plowing into frail homes with a force that by some estimates appoached that of a tornado, but sprawling across a huge area of this far-flung archipelago, Typhoon Haiyan delivered a crippling blow to this country’s midsection. Disorder and looting over the weekend compounded the destruction.
The first and most vocal city to cry for help over the weekend was Tacloban on Leyte Island, which was also one of the first places hit by the storm. From many other communities along the storm’s track, virtually all communications were cut off.
The typhoon left Tacloban in ruins, as a storm surge as high as 13 feet overwhelmed its streets, with reports from the scene saying most of the houses had been damaged or destroyed in the city of 220,000. More than 300 bodies have already been recovered, said Tecson John S. Lim, the city administrator, adding that the toll could reach 10,000 in Tacloban alone.
“There is no power, no water, nothing,” Mr. Gazmin said. “People are desperate. They’re looting.”
The typhoon began turning its deadly force Sunday toward central and northern Vietnam, where more than 500,000 people were evacuated even as meteorologists said the typhoon had begun weakening from the sustained winds of 190 miles an hour that it brought to the Philippines. But as it neared the mainland, it turned northward, its eye skirting the Vietnamese coastline.
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