At Least 10,00 Feared Dead in Philippines Typhoon

At LAT, "Typhoon may have killed nearly 10,000 in Philippines."

At at WSJ, "Thousands Feared Dead in the Philippines in Wake of Typhoon: Red Cross and Authorities Fear Toll Could Rise to the Thousands":

MANILA—The Philippine National Red Cross said Sunday that the death toll from supertyphoon Haiyan could run into the thousands, adding that it is difficult to perform the grim calculations because the massive storm left bodies scattered over wide areas.

Photographs and video taken Sunday in Tacloban—a city especially hard hit—showed dead people being pulled from rubble and mud, cars and boats tossed into piles and homes shredded.

"This is a monumental disaster. As of now, there's no time to count the bodies. The dead bodies are not in one place like what happened in Ormoc," Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, told The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Gordon, a former senator, was referring to the 1991 flash floods caused by a typhoon in Ormoc City on the island of Leyte which claimed more than 5,000 lives—the most on record caused by a storm in the Philippines.

Health Assistant Secretary Eric Tayag, who was with a medical team deployed to set up three mobile hospitals in Tacloban, said the government is considering digging a mass grave to bury the dead there.

The National Disaster and Risk Reduction Management Council said the typhoon has affected more than 4.5 million people in the 36 provinces in the central Philippines and in the southern part of the main island of Luzon. It said more than 477,000 people were displaced by Haiyan and 400,000 of them are in evacuation centers.

Haiyan, locally known as Yolanda, pounded three dozen provinces in the central Philippines and the southern section of the main island of Luzon with gale-force winds that stirred five-yard-high storm surges that flooded coastal towns.