Roundup: 2 years after, Philippine Haiyan survivors still in need of permanent houses

Two years after super-typhoon Haiyan (local name Yolanda) devastated several island-provinces in central Philippines on Nov. 8, 2013, thousands of survivors are still waiting for permanent houses promised to them by the government.

In a radio interview on the eve of the second anniversary of the landfall of Haiyan, Mayor Alfred Romualdez of Tacloban City said that only about 500 out of the 12,000 permanent houses pledged by the national government have been completed two years after the disaster.

Tacloban, a major coastal city that was nearly completely destroyed by Haiyan, is now bustling with activities with restaurants, malls and shops reopened and most of the destroyed buildings rebuilt.

Some meteorologists have agreed that Haiyan was the strongest typhoon ever to make landfall on earth.

In his website, "Weather Underground," meteorologist Jeff Masters said that Haiyan had winds of 190 to 195 mph when it struck the Philippines, making it the strongest cyclone ever recorded in history.

The government's official pronouncement said that the super-typhoon, which triggered tsunami-like waves that swept over wide swath of the coastal areas in the provinces of Leyte and Samar killed over 6,000, injured more than 28,000 while thousands were missing.

On Saturday, or two years after the disaster, six more bodies were found in Tacloban City prompting some observers to say that the official figure of 6,300 dead may not be accurate.

In the aftermath of super-typhoon, several countries, including China, provided relief and rehabilitation assistance to the victims. Aside from sending temporary shelter materials and medical supplies, China also sent its state-of-the art hospital ship, Peace Ark, to treat hundreds of injured survivors.

The government of President Beningo Aquino III has not released any official statement on Haiyan's second anniversary.

The president, or any of his top officials, was not present in ceremonies held in Tacloban City marking Haiyan's 2nd anniversary.

But the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), tasked to oversee government rehabilitation program for the affected areas, admitted on Friday that building permanent shelters for the calamity's survivors remains the "greatest challenge" of the agency's rehabilitation efforts.

DSWD Secretary Corazon Soliman, also in a radio interview, said that some 1,000 families in Tacloban, Leyte are still staying in bunkhouses because of delays in the construction of permanent homes due to questions on settlement location and shortage of construction materials.

Soliman said the National Housing Authority (NHA) has to build and repair a total of 205,000 permanent housing units for the typhoon survivors.

According to Soliman, only 40 million pesos (0.87 million U.S. dollars) remains of the over 1.1 billion pesos (0.025 billion U.S. dollars) donated by various humanitarian groups for Haiyan survivors.

The DSWD received the donations from December 2013 until August 2015 and does not include donations received by the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and United Nations (UN) groups on behalf of the government.

In August, Chaloka Beyani, U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights of internally-displaced persons, urged the Philippine government to speed up the completion of housing for thousands of people made homeless by Haiyan.

"While the government is to be commended in terms of its immediate responses, its attention to ensuring sustainable durable solutions for IDPs (internally displaced persons) remains inadequate to date," Beyani said in a statement posted on the UN website.

Beyani was in the Philippines late in July to check on the government's handling of people displaced by Yolanda and by fighting between the military and Muslim rebels in the south.

Aside from falling short of safety standards, the wood-and-tin "bunkhouses" also leave women and girls vulnerable to sexual abuse and early pregnancy, Beyani said.

The government of President Aquino launched a 150-billion-peso (3.2 billion U.S. dollars) reconstruction program for the disaster zones.

Among the countries in Southeast Asia, the Philippines is the most vulnerable to typhoons emanating from the Pacific Ocean. An average of 20 typhoons hits the country every year, causing heavy casualties and damage to agriculture, infrastructure and private property. Endit