Typhoon Haiyan Update: Australian Planes Take off for Immediate Philippine Aid
Two Australian planes left from Darwin, Wednesday, Nov 13, to transport medical aid and emergency supplies to Tacloban City, Philippines to aid victims of typhoon Haiyan, ABC reports. The planes target to land in the Philippines by afternoon.
The Globemaster plane was carrying 25 tonnes of emergency and medical supplies while the Hercules plane carried a team of doctors, nurses support staff, logistic experts and a radiographer. The team was designated to stay in the Philippines for at least two weeks.
Dr Ian Norton, the leader of the medical team, said they are bracing themselves for the worst case scenario.
"We are going in to a region that is still just reeling and recovering, so the response pace is very, very active. We are likening it to an Aceh response."
Lieutenant Dirk Taylor, pilot for one of the planes said that the group had been warned about some possible delays due to air traffic in the area. There had been long lines and build-up of relief goods and other aid at the local airport.
Mr Taylor said the group is determined to bring all the emergency supplies to Tacloban and give medical aid immediately to those who had been injured.
In a report from ABC Philippines correspondent Stephen McDonell, he said that military planes were important to carry emergency supplies to Tacloban and then to transport people out from the area.
"Military planes packed full [with aid] in one direction... return with people coming back in the other. They'll keep doing that till they can clear, well, I'd have to imagine the majority of the population out of Tacloban, because there's nothing there," Mr McDonell reports.
"Imagine you've got an entire city and then you take away food, you take away electricity, you take away shelter - well it can't sustain itself for very long."
"And then there are all these communities beyond Tacloban. People are walking into Tacloban from much more isolated, devastated areas, hoping for some help. What they're finding it's the remnants of the city that used to be there. So really they've got to get a lot of people out of there, at least so they can start clearing the debris, and start building tent cities and the like and having just some sort of a semblance of a recovery. At the moment it's still a rescue operation, really."
Meanwhile, Philippine Ambassador to Australia Belen Anota emphasised how the effects of perilous climate change in the environment was proven with what was happening in the Philippines.
"This [typhoon] is extraordinarily strong... I've never had that experience before in the past. The area where the typhoon passed was not normally the area where the typhoon passes... where do you attribute all these things in terms of the typhoon path, the frequency and the area that it hits?," Ms Anota told delegates at the climate change conference in Poland.
"This is the reason why we have such a thing as climate change adaptation, [and] climate change mitigation. We do recognise the disastrous effects for us because we are an island nation... we are surrounded by water. Climate change is not just about typhoon and floods and storm surges... we also suffer from drought," Ms Anota emphasised.