Water a pressing concern for typhoon survivors


TACLOBAN, Philippines (AP) — Since the typhoon hit, Danny Estember has been hiking three hours round-trip into the mountains each day to obtain what he can only hope is clean water for his five daughters and two sons.



"I'm thirsty and hungry. I'm worried — no food, no house, no water, no money," said Estember, a 50-year-old ambulance driver.

Thousands of other people who sought shelter under the solid roof of the Tacloban City Astrodome also must improvise, taking water from wherever they can — a broken water pipe or a crumpled tarp. The water is salty and foul tasting but it is all many have had for days.

The U.S. Institute of Medicine defines an adequate daily intake of fluids as roughly 3 liters (100 ounces) for men and about 2.2 liters (75 ounces) for women. Given the shortages and hot climate, it's certain that most in the disaster zone aren't getting anything like those amounts, leaving them prone to energy-sapping dehydration.


Haiti's devastating 2010 earthquake was followed by a cholera outbreak that health officials say has killed more than 8,000 people and sickened nearly 600,000. Some studies have shown that cholera may have been introduced in Haiti by U.N. troops from Nepal, where the disease is endemic.




Water provisioning should get a big boost with the recent arrival of the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS George Washington, a virtual floating city with a distillation plant that can produce 1.5 million liters (400,000 gallons) of fresh water per day — enough to supply 2,000 homes, according to the ship's website.







A single 500-milliliter (12-ounce) bottle of mineral water delivered by the military three days earlier is all that's available for his parents, sister, brother-in-law and a friend. To stretch their supply, they've been collecting rainwater in buckets and any other containers they can find and boiling it. They're also using rainwater to clean: His mother dunks clothing into a bucket of rainwater and tries to scrub out the filth.

The family plans to wait one more week. If help hasn't come by then, they'll try to find a way out of Tacloban so they can stay with relatives elsewhere. "We have no house. We have no home. But we're still intact," Llanera said.


Christopher Bodeen reported from Beijing.
