Philippines digs mass graves for typhoon victims

Mass burials are underway in the devastated city of Tacloban, where workers buried 100 of its thousands of dead on a hillside Thursday, the first of what will likely be many such burials for victims of Typhoon Haiyan.

Six days after the typhoon struck the central Philippines, many of the dead were still lying along roads as survivors searched for bodies buried under the rubble. Dozens of bodies were lined up in bags outside Tacloban City Hall waiting to be taken to burial sites.

The official death toll from the storm, which reduced Tacloban to rubble, stands at 2,357, but that number is likely to rise as ongoing rescue operations uncover more bodies.

With sweat rolling down their faces, John Cajipe, 31, and three teenage boys who work at the Tacloban cemetery placed the first body in the grave's right-hand corner.

The second body followed two minutes later, carefully placed alongside the first. And so on, until scores of coffins filled the 6-foot-deep grave. A ritual to sprinkle holy water on the site is expected to be held Friday, one week after the typhoon struck.

A portion of the femur was removed from each corpse by the National Bureau of Investigation so that technicians can extract DNA from each bit of bone to try to identify the dead, said Joseph David, crime photographer for the bureau.

"I hope this is the last time I see something like this," said Tacloban’s Mayor Alfred Romualdez. "When I look at this, it just reminds me of what has happened from the day the storm hit until today."

Fortunately for beleaguered residents of Tacloban, the capital of the Philippines’ hardest-hit province, aid and supplies have begun to arrive as the airport reopens, giving a boost to relief efforts.

In addition to the USS George Washington, about a half-dozen U.S. ships are already in the area, along with two P-3 aircraft that are being used to survey the damage from the sky so planners can assess where aid is most needed, the Seventh Fleet said.

"We are operating 24/7," said Capt. Cassandra Gesecki, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Marine Corps, which has set up an operations hub near Manila's international airport. "We are inundated with flights."

But U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said distribution of aid is still a challenge.

Emergency supplies of food, water and medical kits are ready to be delivered, but they remain frustratingly out of survivors' reach. Much of the aid, and the staff needed to distribute it, has been stuck in Manila and the nearby airport of Cebu, a 45-minute flight away.

Amos admitted that the U.N. had let people down because it had not been able to get aid to survivors more quickly. She told Al Jazeera that the roads in the country had proved impassable because of debris.

“We're also challenged when the supplies get there, because there is no fuel, there are very few trucks on the ground," she said. "So we need to find a way to get those good into Tacloban."

Philippine Special Forces troops stationed at the airport in Tacloban held back hundreds of people, many of whom had walked for hours to reach the airport and then waited for days with little or no food or water. 

"The situation is dismal ... tens of thousands of people are living in the open ... exposed to rain and wind," Amos told reporters in Manila on Thursday.

Tacloban City Administrator Tecson John Lim told the Reuters news agency that the city government remains paralyzed, with just 70 workers, compared with 2,500 normally. Many were killed or injured, had lost family or were simply too overcome with grief to work.

The government was distributing 50,000 "food packs" each day containing 12 pounds of rice and canned goods, but that covers just 3 percent of the 1.73 million families affected by the typhoon.

Widespread looting of rice stockpiles and other supplies broke out across hardest-hit Leyte province on Wednesday despite the deployment of soldiers to maintain law and order in the wake of the typhoon.

Jericho Petilla, the Philippine energy secretary, has said it may take six weeks before the first typhoon-battered towns get power back.

Al Jazeera with wire services