Looking Forward To Final Yolanda Homes

Seven years after super-typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan) hit Samar, Leyte, and the rest of Eastern Visayas on November 7, 2013, killing over 6,300 people and damaging over a million houses, Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles announced this weekend that the housing project for Ormoc City victims has now been completed.

Yolanda was one of the most powerful and deadliest typhoons ever recorded. When it hit land in Guiuan, Eastern Samar, at 8:40 p.m., it had maximum winds of 280 kilometers per hour. It then hit Leyte and four more islands in the Visayas before emerging over the South China Sea. It then turned northwestward, eventually hitting Vietnam on November 10.

The typhoon severely affected 171 municipalities in 14 provinces as it crossed Eastern Visayas, destroyed around 580,000 houses, and damaged about 580,000 others, many of them in Tacloban and Ormoc cities which are situated near the end of bays and were thus hit with huge storm surges.