US military begins running 24-hour relief operation

(13 Nov 2013) US Brigadier General Paul Kennedy said on Wednesday that his troops would install equipment at Tacloban airport to allow planes to land at night, as relief operations in this typhoon-devastated region of the Philippines picked up pace.
The minimal amounts of water, food and medical supplies reaching the hardest-hit areas were causing increasingly desperate survivors to take matters into their own hands with reports of looters breaking into homes, malls and garages in search for food and water.
Tacloban city was almost completely destroyed in Friday's typhoon and has become the main relief hub.
"The US is largely focused on, with the Philippines, on Tacloban and this island of Sumar," Kennedy told reporters.
"Obviously this is the largest concentration of people, 350-thousand folks at Tacloban," he said, adding that aid from Canada would focus on the Visayas islands.
Kennedy said it was a considerable relief operation with the entire Pacific Command responding to the crisis.
"We have water purification units that are coming today. We have got expeditionary runway sets that are coming out, so that will include what we call a mini tower. Then we have light sets that are going up today. So we can start doing 24-hour operations starting today," he said.
A Norwegian ship carrying supplies left from Manila, while an Australian air force transport plane took off from Canberra carrying a medical team.
British and American navy vessels are also en route to the region.
Friday's typhoon levelled tens of thousands of homes in region, which is used to typhoons. In some places, tsunami-like storm surges swept up to one-kilometre (mile) inland, causing more destruction and loss of life.
At least 580-thousand people have been displaced.
The official toll from a national disaster agency rose to 1, 883 on Tuesday.
President Benigno Aquino III told CNN in a televised interview that the toll could be closer to 2,000 or 2,500, lower than an earlier estimate from two officials on the ground who said they feared as many as 10-thousand might be dead.


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