Aeriel footage shows how Tacloban has recovered six months on from the natural disaster. Some details:

Six months on from Typhoon Haiyan, The Telegraph’s Lewis Whyld, who covered its immediate aftermath with an unmanned drone, returns to see how the worst affected city is recovering
Nearly six months after Typhoon Haiyan swept through the central Philippines killing more than 6,300 people, one of the worst hit cities is struggling to find its feet.

Political rivalries, a lack of resources and the devastating impact the disaster had on Tacloban’s people and economy mean reconstruction has proved slow.On the eve of Haiyan’s six-month anniversary The Telegraph’s Lewis Whyld, who covered its immediate aftermath with an unmanned drone, returned to see how the worst affected city was recovering.

Sadly, when recovery lacks direction and resources, the result is a “snap back” by people desperate to put their lives back together.  As noted in the final paragraph of the article:

There are signs up and everybody knows the rule that you can’t build near the sea but it is blindingly obviously that they are doing that. The first thing I saw was that everyone is rebuilding exactly where they were living previously. At the moment it is really up in the air for a lot of families.”

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Thanks to Laura Olson for the citation.

From a front-page story in the Washington Post today, a most discouraging account of the recovery process in the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan there. See: After typhoon, Philippines faces one of the most profound resettlement crises in decades.  I found it quite sobering to read about the demands and challenges the recovery poses. The no. of victims after this event is greater than either Haiti or the Indonesian Tsunami.  And while many people seem to know what is needed, too few resources are available to rapidly engage in the processes and measure for an effective and equitable recovery.

Dealing with 4 million homeless people is a giant task for any country,but ti would seem to me that more progress  could be made than is happening now.

Update: See the Jan. 2014 issue of the Hazards Observer for a couple of in-depth articles about Typhoon Haiyan.

From the Wall St. Journal, Typhoon Haiyan: How a Catastrophe Unfolded. Some of the key points are:

But many of their efforts, it turned out, were woefully inadequate. Some officials miscalculated the biggest threat that Typhoon Haiyan posed to the city and its surroundings. They used a term for the storm that wasn’t widely understood. They grossly underestimated the havoc the storm would wreak, stocking far too few supplies for a city to survive on in an emergency. And they failed, despite vigorous efforts, to move many of the most vulnerable people out of harm’s way. For almost 24 hours, local and national officials in Tacloban had no way even to call for help. They had simply failed to imagine a storm so large.