Philippines devastation is 'bedlam'

                  

                  
Three days after Typhoon Haiyan hit, aerial photos are revealing a scene of apocalyptic devastation along a swathe of the central Philippines.

                 
A 21-year-old woman lies exhausted on the debris-covered floor at a makeshift medical facility in Tacloban after giving birth to a baby girl. The storm surge swept away her mother.

The head of the Red Cross in the Philippines has described the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan as "absolute bedlam". Officials estimate up to 10,000 people have died in Tacloban city and hundreds elsewhere. Hundreds of thousands of people are displaced. The typhoon flattened homes, schools and an airport. It has since made landfall in northern Vietnam, near the Chinese border, where it has weakened to a tropical storm.


Supplies
Four million people have been affected in the Philippines, and many are now struggling to survive without food, shelter or clean drinking water.

A huge international relief effort is under way, but rescue workers have struggled to reach some towns and villages cut off since the storm.

"There's an awful lot of casualties, a lot of people dead all over the place, a lot of destruction," Richard Gordon, head of the Philippine Red Cross, told the BBC.

"It's absolute bedlam right now, but hopefully it will turn out better as more and more supplies get into the area."

He said roads had now been cleared to allow relief workers to get to the hardest hit areas, but that they expected to find many more casualties.

"It's only now that they were able to get in and we're beginning just to bring in the necessary food items... as well as water and other things that they need."

Forecasters predicted a tropical depression would move into the south and central Philippines on Tuesday, potentially bringing heavy rains that would further hamper relief efforts.


Volunteers from the Search and Rescue Unit Foundation filmed aerial views of the damage
Jane Cocking, the humanitarian director for Oxfam, said her colleagues witnessed "complete devastation... entire parts of the coastline just disappeared, and sizable trees just bent over and [were] thrown about like matchsticks."

The latest report from the Philippines' Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council confirmed 255 deaths as of 22:00 GMT on Sunday. It said almost 630,000 people had been reported displaced.

But officials have warned that the number of dead will rise significantly.