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Nine days after Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated the central Philippines, and Richard Gordon is leading the Philippine Red Cross from this operations center in the country’s capital. The latest official tally has about <\/span>5,000 dead from the storm\u2014only half the 10,000 initially estimated by a local official who got a tongue-lashing from the Philippine president and lost his job. But Mr. Gordon has just answered a phone call from the Department of Health seeking 500 additional body bags for the relatively unscathed city of Cebu, and he notes that in the hard-hit provinces of Leyte and Samar, “we haven’t even gotten inside yet,” beyond immediate coastal areas.<\/span><\/p>\n The body-bag shortage reflects the human suffering and logistical difficulty that have haunted the Philippines since the Nov. 8 super storm. White on the outside and yellow on the inside, each one appears large enough for two adult bodies\u2014or one bloated drowning victim. The bags are also brand new. “I had to have this made, I had to open a factory,” says Mr. Gordon, who ordered up 2,000 after Haiyan made landfall with such force. Now they’re in short supply yet still in high demand, more than a week later. “Unforgivable,” he says.<\/span><\/p>\n “Do you know how hard it is for me to tell somebody that is supposed to be cutting trees, cutting the debris, saving lives\u2014’Sorry, I have to ask you this, you have to do it, pick up the bodies.’ Very hard. And they all say, ‘Yes sir, we’ll do it.’ “<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Philippine Red Cross Chairman Richard Gordon<\/span><\/strong> tells Red Cross Volunteers that they have to pick up rotting bodies. <\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/strong>Mr. Gordon, 68, works from a bland, windowless conference room as red-vested volunteers and boxes of relief goods clog the hallways outside. Around the table, yellow legal pads, scribbled dry-erase boards and glowing computer spreadsheets are meant to keep track of assets heading to the disaster zone from around the Philippines and across the world. The scene recalls the quip, attributed to U.S. Gen. Omar Bradley, that amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics. It also offers lessons for future disasters.<\/span><\/p>\n Red Cross staffers here don’t speak of generalized “relief efforts” but of many separate responsibilities, each with numerous component parts: search-and-rescue operations, field medicine, food and water distribution, construction of shelter, electricity production. Assets devoted to water-supply alone include personnel, 15,000-liter tanker trucks, storage bladders, purification tools, jerrycans and more. Items mentioned by Mr. Gordon in a short briefing for visitors from the South Korean Red Cross include ambulances, fire trucks, rubber boats, lights, earthmovers, blood banks, medicine, satellite phones, cots, showers, tents, blankets and mosquito nets<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nine days after Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated the central Philippines, and Richard Gordon is leading the Philippine Red Cross from this operations center in the country’s capital. The latest official tally has about 5,000 dead from the storm\u2014only half the 10,000 initially estimated by a local official who got a tongue-lashing from the Philippine president […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2994\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.philippinesentinel.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}