“Now I can laugh again, but I’ll always remember them,” said Ando, 57, who survived because she heeded official warnings to go inland before the storm hit.
Ten years later, the family’s mass grave is one among the few visible reminders of the destruction in Tacloban, the capital of Leyte province.
Tacloban bore the brunt of Haiyan’s fury and needed to be rebuilt almost from scratch.
Now it looks like all other Filipino city, with congested streets and bustling restaurants.
An 18 km (11 mi) long seawall was built along the coast to guard it from future storm surges.
“I think we have fully recovered,” Mayor Alfred Romualdez said during a recent visit to the town of about 280,000.
As the Philippines prepares to mark the tenth anniversary of Haiyan, Romualdez said survivors have “moved on” from the disaster.
“But I do not think they’ll ever forget,” he said.
Scientists have long warned that storms are getting stronger because the world warms as a consequence of human-induced climate change.
The Philippines, which generally experiences greater than 20 major storms a 12 months, has extensive experience in coping with natural disasters.
However, this didn’t prepare the country for one among the strongest typhoons in history.
Haiyan unleashed winds of as much as 315 kilometers per hour, which flattened towns on a 600-kilometer stretch of the central islands.
Coastal homes and buildings that were considered protected enough for use as evacuation centers on the islands of Leyte and Samar were flooded by storm surges as much as five meters high.
Some 6,300 people died, and ten years later over a thousand are still missing.
More than 4 million people were left homeless.
“I feel like we have learned a lot of lessons when it comes to national government and local government,” Romualdez said. “But I would say there are still many, many lessons that we need to learn and that we need to institutionalize.”
Since Haiyan, the country has invested in early warning systems, mass text messaging technology and public apps to discover potentially dangerous areas, disaster and weather officials said.
Hazard maps utilized by government agencies are also usually updated, weather warnings are issued earlier and in local languages, and anticipatory evacuation is standard practice.
“The mindset has changed,” said Edgar Posadas, director of the Civil Defense Office in Manila.
Posadas said local governments now use their very own funds, food parcels and emergency personnel quite than counting on the national government, enabling them to reply more quickly to disasters.
The changes are credited with lowering the death toll since Haiyan.
In December 2021, super typhoon Rai damaged or destroyed almost twice as many homes as Haiyan, however the death toll was lower than 500, in line with UN and government data.
“Experience really is the best teacher,” weather service chief Juanito Galang said.
Many of those killed in Tacloban lived near the ocean in flimsy huts product of wood and corrugated iron.
The government has since demolished many slum areas and moved roughly 14,000 families to relocation sites outside the reach of storm surges.
Although concrete homes are safer than sheds, some places still lack running water.
Rosie Boaquena, 63, moved to a house 13 km from downtown Tacloban, but her two sons decided to remain in a one-room house by the ocean to be closer to work.
“One of my sons sells fish, so he had to leave [the relocation site] at midnight to pick up the fish, but there is no public transport at night,” she said.
Ando was also assigned a house within the hilly estate, but she didn’t spend a single night there.
Instead, she rebuilt her house on the identical plot of land near the ocean where she had lived all her life and had many memories.
On Wednesday, Ando, like yearly, will mark the anniversary of Haiyan’s death by gathering family and neighbors near the mass grave for prayers.
Six of her relatives are still missing and presumed dead, and one among her sons was left permanently disabled by the storm.
“We didn’t know what a storm surge was back then,” she said. “Now when a typhoon comes, we evacuate immediately.”
