The death toll from a powerful typhoon that swept the central Philippines nearly doubled overnight, reaching 4,000, as helicopters from a U.S. aircraft carrier and other naval ships began flying food, water and medical teams to ravaged regions.
President Benigno Aquino, caught off guard by the scale of the disaster, has been criticised for the slow pace of aid distribution and unclear estimates of casualties, especially in Tacloban, capital of hardest-hit Leyte province.
A notice board in Tacloban City Hall estimated the deaths at 4,000 on Friday, up from 2,000 a day before, in that town alone. Hours later, Tacloban mayor Alfred Romualdez apologised and said the toll was for the whole central Philippines.
The toll, marked up on a whiteboard, is compiled by officials who started burying bodies in a mass grave on Thursday.
Romualdez said some people may have been swept out to sea and their bodies lost after a tsunami-like wall of seawater slammed into coastal areas. One neighborhood with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 was now deserted, he said.
The City Hall toll was the first public acknowledgement that the number of fatalities would likely far exceed an estimate given this week by Aquino, who said the loss of life from Typhoon Haiyan would be closer to 2,000 or 2,500.
Official confirmed deaths nationwide rose by more than 1,000 overnight to 3,621 on Friday after the typhoon, one of the strongest ever recorded roared across the central Philippines a week ago.
Adding to the confusion, the United Nations, citing government figures, put the latest overall death toll at 4,460, but a spokeswoman said it was now reviewing the figure.
On Tuesday, Aquino said estimates of 10,000 dead by local officials were overstated and caused by "emotional trauma". Elmer Soria, a regional police chief who made that estimate to media, was removed from his post on Thursday.
A police spokesman said Soria was due to be transferred to headquarters in Manila. But a senior police official told Reuters he believed Soria was re-assigned because of his unauthorized casualty estimate.
Stunned survivors in Tacloban said the toll could be many thousands. "There are a lot of dead people on the street in our neighborhood, by the trash," said Aiza Umpacan, a 27-year-old resident of San Jose, one of the worst-hit neighborhoods.
The preliminary number of missing as of Friday, according to the Red Cross, rose to 25,000 from 22,000 a day earlier. That could include people who have since been located, it said.
The nuclear-powered USS George Washington aircraft carrier and accompanying ships arrived off eastern Samar province on Thursday evening, carrying 5,000 crew and more than 80 aircraft.
U.S. sailors have brought food and water ashore in Tacloban and the eastern Samar province town of Guiuan whose airport was a U.S. naval air base in World War Two. The carrier is moored near where U.S. General Douglas MacArthur's force landed on Oct. 20, 1944, in one of the biggest Allied victories.
A Norwegian merchant navy training vessel arrived at Tacloban on Friday with goods from the U.N. World Food Program, including 40 tons of rice, medical equipment and 6,200 body bags.
Boxes of aid were being unloaded at Tacloban's badly damaged airport, where more than a thousand people queued for hours hoping to evacuate. The tarmac was a hive of activity, with three large South Korean military transport planes joining two U.S. Osprey aircraft and U.S. Navy helicopters unloading and ferrying aid.
Hundreds of people, part of nearly a million who have been displaced by the storm, lined up for food and drink at an evacuee processing center at Mactan Air Base in Cebu, the country's second-biggest city.
Some 522 evacuees passed through the center on Thursday, with hundreds more arriving on Friday, a government coordinator, Erlinda Parame, said.
REUTERS