“FORCED EVACUATIONS”
In Cagayan, officials worked in driving rain Thursday to evacuate residents along the coasts and on the banks of already swollen rivers.
“Yesterday it was preemptive evacuations. Now we’re doing forced evacuations,” local disaster official Edward Gaspar told AFP by phone hours before landfall, adding 1,404 residents were sheltering at a municipal gym.
“There are many more evacuees in nearby villages but we haven’t had time to visit and count them,” he added.
Cagayan’s civil defence chief Rueli Rapsing said he expected local governments to take 40,000 people to shelters, roughly the same number that were preemptively evacuated ahead of Typhoon Yinxing, which struck Cagayan’s north coast earlier this month.
More than 5,000 Cagayan residents were still in shelters following the previous storms because the Cagayan river, the country’s largest, remained swollen from heavy rain that fell in several provinces upstream.
“We expect this situation to persist over the next few days” as Usagi brings more rain, Rapsing told AFP.
After Usagi, Tropical Storm Man-yi is also forecast to strike the Philippines’ population heartland around Manila this weekend.
OVERLAPPING TYPHOONS
A high-pressure area in southern Japan will cause the storm to follow a more southerly track than Usagi, the weather service said.
“Typhoons are overlapping. As soon as communities attempt to recover from the shock, the next tropical storm is already hitting them again,” UN Philippines Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Gustavo Gonzalez said.
“In this context, the response capacity gets exhausted and budgets depleted.”
A UN assessment of the past month’s weather disasters said 207,000 houses had been damaged or destroyed, and nearly 700,000 people were seeking temporary shelter.
Many families were without even essentials like sleeping mats, hygiene kits, and cooking supplies, and had limited access to safe drinking water, it said.
The storms destroyed thousands of hectares of farmland and persistent flooding is likely to delay replanting efforts and worsen food supply problems, the report added.
About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the archipelago nation or its surrounding waters each year, killing scores of people and keeping millions in enduring poverty.
A recent study showed that storms in the Asia-Pacific region are increasingly forming closer to coastlines, intensifying more rapidly and lasting longer over land due to climate change.
