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Philippines Typhoon Hagupit Less Destructive Than Feared
December 7, 2014  By jlindner Leave a Comment Partially submerged houses during Typhoon Hagupit’s slash through the Philippines.
Josh Kyller, who has overseen CRS’ recovery work after Haiyan and now leads the response in Samar, sent the following post.
The rains and winds from Hagupit were really strong last night, keeping the 6 CRS staff sheltering with me at a colleague’s house up most of the night. The storm was vicious and intense, yet the winds were only a third as strong as typhoon Haiyan one year ago. While electricity is still out in Tacloban, our cell phones are working.

When the winds subsided an hour or two after daylight, we ventured out and made our way to the CRS Tacloban office. Some roofs are damaged in the city, but there’s no comparison to the devastation last year. We quickly organized into teams to go check on some of the thousands of shelters CRS has built as part of our Haiyan recovery. The structures fared well due to the typhoon-resilient building techniques our engineers and construction foremen used when repairing homes and constructing new shelters.
Tomorrow 15 of us will travel overland in two small, fast moving teams to reach both the east and west coasts of Samar, the island just to the east of Tacloban and the first landfall point for Hagupit. All of our staff in Samar are safe, but when they tried to reach areas that are harder hit, the roads were blocked with debris. The road situation across the board in Samar is not good. We’re hoping to get to the places we want to go tomorrow, but that’s not certain. The Philippine government was out with heavy equipment this afternoon to begin clearing the roads.
I will be on a rapid assessment team trying to make it to the town of Borongan on the central east coast of Samar. As of this evening it is still totally cut off and no one has word on damage there. Another team will go up the west coast of the island, aiming to reach a town called Catbologan. Our teams are small because we have to be totally self-sustaining. We don’t know the availability of food, water or places to sleep, so we have to bring enough supplies to last for a few days until we learn what’s available in these hard-hit places. Larger response teams will follow shortly.
We have relief goods shipping out from Davao in southern Philippines first thing in the morning. They should reach Samar by Wednesday. This first shipment will have enough shelter, WASH and household supplies to help 2,000 families, but we can funnel more goods up quickly once we have information about the hardest-hit places.
We are getting a sense now that the greatest damage from Hagupit is a swath through the central part of Samar. We already have 120 staff working in Samar so we are in a good position to help. We also have strong connections with the local Church network.
A response in this very rural part of Samar will be challenging. Central Samar is rural and the population is spread out. There are many tiny islands off both the east and west coasts that probably suffered heavy damage. Access on Samar itself will be difficult: many towns have bad roads and others have no roads at all.
Elsewhere, NASSA (Caritas Philippines) is checking on other provinces near Samar – Biliran and Masbate. We will work with Caritas Philippines and the international Caritas network to make sure help reaches families as quickly as possible.
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