Typhoon Haiyan: a journalist’s struggle to convey the grim reality of storm’s aftermath – book extract

Agnes Bun is an award-winning video journalist for Agence France-Presse who for the past 10 years has covered major stories in Asia including the Rohingya refugee crisis and the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

She writes about many of her experiences while on assignment in her upcoming book, There’s No Poetry in a Typhoon (published by Abbreviated Press).

In this excerpt, translated from the original French by Melanie Ho, Bun describes the devastation – human and material – she witnessed in the Philippines five years ago in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan (called Typhoon Yolanda locally), one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded:

The heat in Tacloban was stifling and clammy. It was November 2013, and we had disembarked from the military plane just after Typhoon Haiyan. A thick silence settled among the passengers – most Filipino military personnel along with a few journalists. I thought there had been an error. We were supposed to land at Tacloban airport.

But in front of us was a field of ruins, kilometres of gaping walls, cars whose roofs had been torn off and fallen trees. I did not understand. Were we supposed to land in the middle of this, in the middle of nothing? Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the sign for Philippine Airlines, bobbing in the empty expanse. This rubble was all that remained of the airport, which had been toppled over like a house of cards by a capricious child.

A few hours after Haiyan’s devastating onslaught on the Philippines, I rushed out of Hong Kong, grabbing my camera and passport and throwing a few things into a makeshift bag. It was a Friday night at an hour when most were cracking open their first beers. The next morning, after arriving in Manila, I negotiated a seat aboard one of the first Philippine military planes headed to the scene of the disaster, just as the Hong Kong revellers were slowly staggering back to their homes, eyes blurry and feet exhausted by excess.