TACLOBAN, Philippines - Typhoon relief gridlock threatened to paralyze rescue operations in the most devastated part of the Philippines on Wednesday, with aid piling up but few ways to distribute it, plentiful gasoline but no merchants willing to sell it, and an influx of emergency volunteers but no place to house them.
The intensifying frustrations of delivering aid five days after Typhoon Haiyan struck elicited a plea from the top U.N. relief official to the mayor of Tacloban, imploring him to persuade gasoline station owners to open so relief convoys can begin a large-scale expansion into the razed port city of 220,000 and the interior regions. The gas stations have fuel in their tanks, but the owners fear theft and violence if they reopen.
“We have to have fuel, so we have to have some kind of refueling center,” the relief official, Valerie Amos, told the mayor, Alfred S. Romualdez.
Romualdez told her that the city could not easily cope with the influx of aid workers, as practically no vehicles are available to bring them in from the airport, while food and drinking water are running out.
The paralysis was epitomized by the first attempt in Tacloban to conduct a mass burial of Haiyan victims whose corpses had spent days putrefying on streets and under piles of debris.
The attempt ended in failure as trucks carrying more than 200 corpses were forced to turn back as gunfire greeted them on the city limits. The identities of the gunmen were not clear.
Covered with black plastic tarpaulin, the bodies were redeposited at a makeshift outdoor morgue.
Jerry Sambo Yaokasin, the second-ranking official in the municipal government, said in an interview that Philippine soldiers and police officers might be stretched too thin to provide security in Tacloban even as they try to reach other coastal communities to assess damage.
The true death toll from the typhoon is a mystery. The Philippine government put the official toll at 2,275.
Few deaths have been confirmed in Tacloban because local officials say they are counting only bodies that they have collected or formally recorded.
