Typhoon in Philippines

Source: BBC News

Officials estimate up to 10,000 people have died in Tacloban city (Leyte Island, Philippines) 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."

Unprecedented storm

Typhoon Haiyan - one of the most powerful storms on record to make landfall - swept through six central Philippine islands on Friday.

It brought sustained winds of 235km/h (147mph), with gusts of 275 km/h (170 mph), with waves as high as 15m (45ft), bringing up to 400mm (15.75 inches) of rain in places.