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Asia Pacific 
Two Families Battered by a Typhoon

By KEITH BRADSHERFEB. 3, 2014
 
Inside








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Video





Play Video|0:44
Born While Floods Surge




Born While Floods Surge

Yolando was born during the worst of typhoon Haiyan. He lives with his family in a region devastated by the storm.

                                    Video by Keith Bradsher                     on
                                                                        Publish Date February 3, 2014.
                            

                                    Photo by Jes Aznar for The New York Times.
                            




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Continue reading the main story




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TACLOBAN, the Philippines — Shortly before dawn, as Typhoon Haiyan thundered ashore, a man took his wife, son and very pregnant daughter on a motorcycle with a sidecar through rising winds to the hospital.As the pregnant woman, Jay-Anne Pica, struggled through labor, the whipped-up ocean began spilling across the city of Tacloban, slamming like a tsunami, filling homes up to a mile inland with water. One of those homes belonged to Jesus Siozon Sr., a 93-year-old retired furniture maker and store owner who would later become possibly the last person in the city to die from the effects of the typhoon.The stories of the child born into poverty and the affluent old man who contracted a fatal infection from the floodwaters unfolded separately but in parallel. Their stories illustrate how the typhoon is transforming this city along class lines, perhaps permanently. 

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                            Related Coverage
                    










Months After Typhoon, Philippine City Suffers From an Exodus of JobsFEB. 3, 2014










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Pictures of Typhoon Haiyan’s WrathNOV. 11, 2013










map



Mapping the Destruction of Typhoon HaiyanNOV. 11, 2013








Times Topic: Typhoon Haiyan (2013) 






When Ms. Pica, 23, who has two other children, arrived at the Eastern Visayas Regional Medical Center just before dawn on Nov. 8, obstetricians quickly determined that the baby was in the wrong position and ordered a cesarean section. Then the electricity failed as the wind and rain brought down power lines and knocked out the hospital’s generator, making surgery impossible.Perspiring doctors and nurses massaged Ms. Pica’s abdomen in near darkness as they tried to maneuver the baby’s head down for delivery. What they did not know, until floodwaters began pouring across the delivery room floor, was that a storm surge was coursing through the coastal neighborhood around the hospital, drowning many.Ms. Pica’s father, a fisherman with arms grown strong from years of operating his own 60-foot outrigger canoe, picked up the chair in which his daughter was sitting. Tilting it so she did not fall out, he carried her upstairs to the hospital chapel. The baby, a boy, was successfully delivered soon after, at 8:20 a.m.But the family’s troubles were just beginning. The baby was not breathing, turning blue instead. So as the wind shrieked and the sea killed thousands of people in the city outside, Ms. Pica and her father, mother and brother began taking turns pumping air by hand into the baby’s lungs.A half-dozen tiny corpses accumulated in the chapel as other mothers, terrified by the storm and in some cases forced to swim through its waves, gave birth to very premature babies for whom no incubators were available. Hour after hour, the Pica family kept pumping air, willing the baby to live. They gave him a name, Kent Niño Pica, but nicknamed him Baby Yolando, a masculine form of the typhoon’s Philippine name, Yolanda.They kept pumping tiny puffs of air for two full days. “We had no water, no food, we were so exhausted as we hadn’t slept, but we had to keep pumping,” said Jaraldina Pica, Ms. Pica’s mother.Finally, slowly, Yolando began to breathe on his own. The family was briefly famous; a television station filmed the baby as air was being pumped into his lungs.But the family, oblivious to the attention the birth had received because virtually all communications and electricity had been cut off in Tacloban, took the baby home three days later — and disappeared.Continue reading the main story
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Like tens of thousands of other residents, they went to the city airport in hopes of catching a relief flight out. The crew of a United States Air Force C-130 relief plane saw the newborn and immediately gave the family a free flight to Manila, where they moved into a single room in a relative’s house. Not even the baby’s father, a 22-year-old who is in high school, knew where they were.
Photo






A Catholic priest blesses the remains of Jesus Siozon Sr., a 93-year-old who would become possibly the last person in Tacloban to die from the effects of the typhoon.

Credit
            Jes Aznar for The New York Times        


For the Siozon family, the storm would prove deadly despite their affluence and access to an easier rescue.When waves began crashing into the family’s three-story house, Mr. Siozon, who used a wheelchair, was stuck on the ground floor in murky water that quickly rose to his neck. Family members carried him upstairs, then began rescuing strangers who managed to crawl out of the water onto the roof of the family’s garage and then in through a window.Almost as soon as the storm ended, relatives in Manila chartered an 8-seat light plane and flew to rescue Mr. Siozon, the family’s patriarch, and other members, said Jesse Siozon, a grandson. The relatives walked across the city to find them, then pushed the elder Mr. Siozon back to the airport in his wheelchair, carefully negotiating the debris along the way, and flew him and others to Manila.But Mr. Siozon suffered an infection from the muddy waters that had nearly drowned him. The infection spread, overwhelming his frail body and he died on Jan. 13. National records show no subsequent typhoon-related deaths. Municipal leaders in Tacloban, Palo and Tanauan — the three cities that together accounted for three-quarters of the typhoon-related fatalities — said they were not aware of any later deaths connected to the storm.The family brought Mr. Siozon’s body home to Tacloban for burial. Three Knights of Columbus in full regalia stood with drawn swords around his coffin during a recent funeral service at the Santo Niño Church. After the service, his grandson Jesse Siozon and other family members headed to the airport for the next flight to Manila.Like many of the city’s wealthier and better educated residents, they are leaving, at least for now, for work. There are few skilled jobs left in this once-thriving city, which has so far shown few signs of economic recovery. With little electricity, and few undamaged buildings, the city’s businesses are struggling to restart.The Picas, by contrast, have returned to Tacloban for good. They have rebuilt an unpainted plywood house with a corrugated steel roof and a United Nations refugee tent next door. It is on a site owned by a relative where they had previously lived in a wood house that was flattened by the typhoon. The elder Mr. Pica lost his boat and nets in the storm, and no one in the clan has a job. They are able to survive on the relief food that is still being distributed, but that may stop as soon as March.As Baby Yolando approaches his three-month birthday on Saturday, he is alert and healthy, and regularly breast-fed by his mother. But his grandmother, Jaraldina Pica, worries about the future, saying that, “I don’t know what we’ll do when the aid stops.”





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