Posted on 11/10/2013 2:03:43 PM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
Latest reports on FOX say that ALL COMMUNICATIONS are down. Even family members are not able to find or communicate with each other.
Heard from a friend, not a FReeper, this morning. The storm missed him by 100 miles.
Art Bell has moved back to Pahrump.
Was a strong Cat 4. Nasty with potentially a few thousand lost due to flooding, but not the worst ever. The faulty reported astronomical wind speed was taken from a satellite and measured in the upper regions of the storm. Not near ground level. For some stupid reason the MSM ran with the faulty wind speed. The Philippine government reported top wind speed of 147 mph. Most places hit hard experienced 100 mph winds. The 147 mph was most intense average wind speed at landfall.
Mark17 is in California. Missed the storm.
I’m skeptical that the estimate of 10,000 is going to be high enough. Most of these communities that were wiped out, and that haven’t been accessed yet are on the coast, and are subsistence fishing communities.
Families there don’t have their own cars, for the most part. They get around by bus, jeepney or trikes. I doubt these places that appear to have been wiped out were completely evacuated.
I’m thinking the 10,000 estimate is way low.
THe India Times article had a storm surge going inward by 1 km. They have nothing over there and are still without communications. Someone flew over in a helicopter.
I read that the exact landfall is also still not sending word from anyone.
There is no way to stay where it’s the worst hit.
Two latest published estimates I’ve seen are 10,000 and 12,000 dead. More than a “few thousand”.
At 870 to 885 mb, I’m willing to believe the measured winds aloft while offshore was correct, considering it was averaged over a very short period of time and unobstructed by land.
AlexW just posted that he’s online and available to answer questions.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3089596/posts?page=66#63
It will be more like 125,000 imho
WVKayaker also checked in. He’s okay but the place he was staying in was hit pretty hard. He moved inland in enough time to be safe while the storm hit.
I have a friend I graduated from high school with in Arizona in 1966 who is an expatriate living on south Cebu Island near Bato in the Philippines. He just emailed me and said they got a lot of rain and the power was out for a while, but things are pretty much back to normal where he’s at. They just had a typhoon last week too and an earthquake before that. He must be blessed because there was no damage to his home and no injuries to anyone he knows.
I have one friend in Manilla who is OK. I have another in Tacloban who is a minister. I have no report at all on his status.
The pictures we've seen so far look like the aftermath of the tsunami in Japan. But it's worse than that. The pictures I've seen so far showed some structures standing. If the winds were that high on the ground no structure would be left standing, at least not toward the core of the storm.
I can remember taking some relief supplies into FL after Andrew, years ago. There was a cinder-block concrete building (the RSU controller shack) next to the runway at Homestead AFB that was mostly gone, with one or two blocks left on the concrete slab. The rest was gone, completely. Many of the residences of Filipinos are built from concrete cinder blocks. And this typhoon was on a level at or worse than Andrew in terms of winds, but much larger is size.
Many areas that were affected the most are inaccessible, because the access routes are blocked. No pictures from there yet, as least not that I've seen (maybe some have, or will be taken from the air).
It'll be weeks before we get a good handle on a reliable number of how many are dead or missing.
My wife’s family lives in the Labangon part of Cebu City. Central Cebu had high winds and a lot of rain. They have downed trees and power lines but is mostly okay. We have talked to them on the phone several times since the storm passed Cebu.
One of our friends has family in northern Leyte. She called today to let us know that her family is okay.
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