key: cord-0827765-dnc0xix2
authors: Mangada, Ladylyn Lim; Cuaton, Ginbert Permejo
title: Typhoon Haiyan survivors at Tacloban North, Philippines: Realities and challenges during the Covid-19 pandemic
date: 2022-02-10
journal: Dialogues in Health
DOI: 10.1016/j.dialog.2022.100005
sha: 5020e3f7bf7b3cb8409521dc997e3f84fab55863
doc_id: 827765
cord_uid: dnc0xix2

More than 15 thousand households have been relocated in Tacloban North, Philippines, after typhoon Haiyan devastated the city in November 2013. While still recovering from the longer-term impacts of the typhoon, these households are currently enduring the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper reports the contemporary realities and challenges Haiyan survivors face at the resettlement sites based on the inputs of 19 key informants we interviewed from September to November 2020. Our data reveal that the current pandemic exacerbated survivors' access to essential social services such as water, education/learning, and health care. The inadequate shelter space also forces survivors to apply non-engineered house repairs or stay out of the house despite quarantine, lockdown, and physical distancing protocols. The pandemic has also increased survivors' livelihood insecurity resulting in a surging incidence of hunger, petty crimes, and neighborhood conflicts. This paper brings to the fore typhoon survivors' contemporary, precarious, and challenging conditions in resettlement sites. Almost ten years since Haiyan, this paper explores the extended pathways of Haiyan survivors' strained and uneven recovery hampered by the contemporary public health crisis that is the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2013, typhoon Haiyan (local name: Yolanda) caused massive destruction in Central Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan, a Category 5 super typhoon, registered as one of the world's most devastating disasters, with close to US$2 trillion estimated damages and 6,300 deaths (NDRRMC, 2014) . In late 2019, SARS-COV-2, a novel coronavirus, first detected in China (Allam, 2020; Huang et al., 2020) , became a vector of the current pandemic. This highly transmissible disease, named Covid-19 by the United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO, 2020), exposed and exacerbated societies' deeply entrenched challenges and revealed wide-and-deep bottlenecks in local, national, and international public health systems.

Given the disease's novel nature and unpredictable development in the early phase of its transmission, some governments rapidly implemented preventive measures to manage the spread policymakers review national and local policies and programs for Haiyan survivors at the resettlement sites.

The Philippines is a hazard-prone country with over 110 million people (United Nations Population Division, 2021) . The country is highly susceptible to geophysical instabilities, such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes (Iuchi et al., 2018) and meteorological and hydrological hazards like typhoons and floods (Bollettino et al., 2020) . Climate change has also been affecting the Philippines in terms of increasing weather extremes and rising sea levels (Bollettino et al., 2020; Perez et al., 1996) . On the other hand, in March 2021, when the first draft of this paper was written, the Philippine Department of Health reported over 747,000 Covid-19 cases, of which more than 13,000 died (DOH, 2021) . As of January 2022, the country has 3.36 million confirmed cases and more than 53,000 deaths from Covid-19 (JHU CSSE, 2022) .

Tacloban, a highly urbanized city in the northern tip of Leyte, is the capital of the Eastern Visayas region. Tacloban and the adjoining municipalities and provinces suffered significant casualties and massive displacements from the onslaught of typhoon Haiyan in 2013 (Curato, 2019; Su & Mangada, 2020) . Following the Haiyan disaster, the Tacloban city government allocated around 80 hectares of land in the northern district (henceforth, Tacloban North), about 40 km from the city center, as 'safe areas' to build new settlements, where survivors who used to live in coastal zones (now declared 'no-build' areas) could relocate.

In the city government's 2014 Tacloban Recovery and Redevelopment Plan (TRRP), Tacloban North has been labeled the 'promised land' for Haiyan survivors. The TRRP aims to "provide housing options; ensure supply of adequate land; prepare supportive plans and policies; and ensure basic services and economic opportunities" (TRSDG, 2014) . The TRRP initially targeted constructing 10,000 permanent duplex and row houses -the so-called Pabahay or products and services (Mangada & Cuaton, 2020) ; the low quality and small sizes of the houses (Eadie, 2019) ; the excessive delay in the construction of critical infrastructures, such as school buildings (Board, 2018) ; and the poor communication and lack of transparency in resettlement processes (Opdyke et al., 2017) . Altogether, this plethora of challenges led to 'sub-standard recovery and the failure to improve the living conditions of many survivors' (Eadie, 2019) .

Tacloban North is now home to at least 31 permanent Pabahay villages/communities dispersed across eleven barangays (village-level communities). Available data that we obtained from the Tacloban City Housing and Community Development Office shows that the National Housing Authority (NHA), a national-level government agency, developed 17 of these Pabahay sites with 14,479 housing units. Some 11,100 houses have already either been raffled or awarded to beneficiaries; yet less than 65% were occupied and used as of June 2020. Apart from these government-initiated housing projects, nongovernment organizations, foundations, and other private agencies built other resettlement sites. This study was conducted at nine Pabahay or resettlement sites in Tacloban North, Philippines (see Figure 1 ). These resettlement sites are Villa Diana, SM Cares village, Dreamville CRS Housing, Ridgeview Park, Greendale 1 and 2, Habitat village, GMA Kapuso village, North Hill Arbours 1 and 2, and Pope Francis village. We considered the early permanent resettlement sites that were constructed/occupied and the availability and accessibility of barangay/village leaders and homeowners' associations' officials (research informants) in selecting these sites.

Tacloban North, Philippines. These informants include six barangay officers, nine officers of each site's homeowners' association, three officers from the city government (disaster risk reduction and management/ DRRM, city development and planning, and housing departments), and four primary school educators (two teachers and two principals). We deemed this number of informants sufficient since they provided adequate, relevant, and enough information to obtain data saturation (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) . This paper is not an attempt to generalize and reflect the absolute realities and challenges all Haiyan survivors face (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) . Rather, our aim is to explain and understand our informants' contextual realities and experiences to explore the differential impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on their lives and communities (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) . We selected the informants based on their strategic position and knowledge since they can be considered local leaders at the resettlement sites. The village leaders interviewed were either the barangay captain or first councilors, while the homeowners' association officers were their associations' presidents or vice presidents. Another important that the first author considered was the difficulty in conducting in-person fieldwork at the time of data gathering due to the strict implementation of the city's community lockdowns and quarantine protocols. In as much as the authors wanted to obtain data from the Haiyan survivors themselves, the critical and risky situation on the ground warranted choosing the least risky fieldwork and informant selection approach to protect the lives of both the residents and the researchers.

The first author initially contacted them over the phone to give them an overview of the study (e.g., objectives, rights as key informants) and the intention to seek their consent to be interviewed. After obtaining informants' consent, the informants and researchers agreed on the schedule and manner of the interview (remote or face-to-face). After the discussions, the first author reminded the informants to contact her for clarification or retraction of their answers which none of them did. For those who opted to be interviewed face to face, the first author either goes to the permanent housing site or meets the informant in the city proper. The informants preferred the latter if they had official business to the town center, such as visiting a government office or purchasing essential items. On the other hand, of the four city government J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof officers who agreed to be interviewed, half opted for face-to-face while the other half chose to be interviewed via mobile phone.

While this exploratory qualitative study did not receive approval from an Ethics Review Board, we adopted a relational approach in key informant interviews. This approach in interviewing adheres to humanist ethos, reflexive learning, and ethical treatment of all participants (Fujii, 2018) We selected our informants using convenience sampling depending on the willingness of the informants to be interviewed. Interviews lasted between 30 and 60 minutes and strictly followed health protocols: wearing facemasks and observing a 2-meter physical distance. The interviewer obtained verbal informed consent from all informants. All interview data were conducted in Waray-Waray (the local language) and not audio-recorded but instead written on fieldnotes. We thematically analyzed our data to distill the pressing challenges faced by Haiyan survivors at Tacloban North resettlement sites amidst the current pandemic. The first author wrote the first draft of the findings based on her field notes. The authors discussed these findings to dissect and categorize the similarities and differences of the data obtained from each informant.

The authors then coded these data and grouped them to develop sentence themes (Bryman, 2016) that encapsulate the realities and significant challenges typhoon Haiyan survivors are experiencing at the resettlement sites during the Covid-19 pandemic. We report and expound on these thematic findings in the next section.

Typhoon Haiyan devastated countless homes in Tacloban city and compounded the challenges faced by the already vulnerable and marginalized low-lying coastal communities in the city. Many residents of these communities have low capacity and few livelihood assets to prepare, cope with, and recover from the damage. Typhoon Haiyan, therefore, intensified J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof peoples' pre-existing precarity, especially the urban poor who are already experiencing economic hardship as a form of disaster. Fast-forward and more than eight years after the typhoon, some survivors face increased vulnerabilities and challenges due to the Covid-19 public health crisis and its subsequent impacts on lives and livelihoods. Below we report three of these critical challenges.

1. Tacloban North's inaccessible location affects survivors' access to essential social services such as water, learning, and health care.

Haiyan survivors in resettlement sites have long endured the lack of access to a stable and clean water supply. Potable water is only and limitedly available at the GMA Kapuso and Habitat villages through a private provider. All other Pabahay sites receive water from a delivery truck/water tank weekly. Water-related challenges became more problematic with Covid-19, which highlighted the need to practice good and proper hygiene (e.g., regular washing of hands and bathing). Some households share communal water faucets since their homes do not have connections from the waterline (see Figure 2 ). Our informants reported that some residents poorly observe physical distancing when fetching water from the communal tap. According to our informants (teachers and principals), teachers usually provide and release individual subject modules every week to pupils. The parents and guardians pick these modules instead of the pupils since the government prohibited all children from going out since they are considered at-risk and vulnerable from Covid. They observed, however, that most pupils fail to submit their modules on time. The two most prominent reasons for this include a) mothers getting sick therefore failing to pick up the learning modules on time, and b) parents not knowing the subject matter and therefore not assisting their children (see Figure 4 ). On the other hand, J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Journal Pre-proof some parents are highly involved in answering their children's learning modules, prompting the teachers to contemplate their students' quality of learning or education. from the city center, forcing survivors to have minimal access to quality health care services (Mangada & Cuaton, 2020) . Since the pandemic, survivors forewent seeking health care for fear of contracting Covid-19 and instead resorted to using natural remedies like medicinal plants and local therapies.

house repairs or stay out of the house despite quarantine, lockdown, and physical distancing protocols.

The row housing units (40 square meters) in Haiyan resettlement sites are small (see Figure 5) . With one open space for cooking and sleeping, compliance with physical distancing protocols was almost impossible. The small space and inferior housing quality push some households-at least those who can afford-to undertake non-engineered extensions (e.g., back, front yards, or second floor) without considering the structural danger of these repairs to their neighbor's housing unit. We observed non-engineered house repairs in North Hill Arbours 1 and 2, Villa Diana, Dreamville, Ridgeview, Habitat, and SM Cares villages. 

Households that do not have the financial capacity to conduct these repairs endure the direct and indirect impacts of the scorching tropical weather. With Tacloban's daily temperature reaching beyond 30 degrees centigrade, some survivors-such as youths-prefer staying outdoors despite the risks from the virus compared to staying with their families inside their "oven houses."

Consequently, our informants observed that teenagers tend to consume illegal drugs and engage in risky sexual encounters due to their preference to stay outside their homes. Our informants attributed these behaviors to the negative impacts of the suspension of face-to-face classes, school closures, and maladaptation to the pandemic (Ogueji, Okoloba, and Ceccaldi, 2021) .

For Covid-19 relief assistance, Mayor Alfred Romualdez's government had provided one whole piece of chicken, a kilogram of fish, and more than 10 kilograms of rice. Through its social welfare and development agency, the national government also provided cash aid to select low-income families through the Social Amelioration Program (Cuaton and Su 2020). Yet, these aides were not enough to support Haiyan survivors to weather the storm brought by According to all informants, the pandemic has directly impacted the livelihoods and income of survivors in Tacloban North-most of whom engage in precarious and unsustainable livelihoods.

On-site job workers and on-call service providers severely felt a decrease or absence of household income due to lost wages/ job loss. Consequently, this condition drove some households to become dependent on the goodwill of their family and friends to get by daily.

However, this dependence is short-lived as those who usually support them also need support.

Other emerging challenges reveal the rise of neighborhood conflicts and the surging incidence of petty thefts in Tacloban North. According to the six barangay officers and nine homeowners' associations' officers, most neighborhood conflicts arose from neighbors' arguments over malicious social media posts to verbal and physical attacks. An example of this is a person under home quarantine from suspected Covid-infection who went out of their house to stab a neighbor shortly after midnight when people were sleeping.

This paper reports the realities and challenges typhoon Haiyan survivors experience at Tacloban North resettlement sites during the Covid-19 pandemic. The current pandemic exacerbated survivors' access to essential social services such as water, education/learning, and health care. The inadequate shelter space also forces survivors to apply non-engineered house repairs or stay out of the house despite quarantine, lockdown, and physical distancing protocols.

The pandemic has also increased survivors' livelihood insecurity resulting in a surging incidence of hunger, petty crimes, and neighborhood conflicts. While some of our informants readily attributed these problems to the pandemic, we argue that these challenges are consequences of various actors' poor development choices and actions during post-Haiyan recovery and rehabilitation. The resettlement of Haiyan survivors from their dangerous coastline homes to farflung Pabahay sites in Tacloban North increased their pre-existing challenges rather than decreased. These challenges reflect the erosion of their livelihood income, which debilitated their socioeconomic conditions further than their pre-Haiyan lives.

The pandemic, compounded by poor government actions and decisions, has further narrowed Haiyan survivors' options to increase their capacity to respond to and adapt to contemporary risks (Gaillard, 2015; Kelman, 2020; Kelman et al., 2016) . This exploratory study, thus, recommends public and other social institutions critically reflect upon relocation, resettlement, re-housing as a strategy for disaster risk reduction. Reducing the challenges and vulnerabilities of disaster survivors is not only a function of spatially transferring them away from high-risk places but also one that requires guarantees of access to various social capitals and social services (Aldrich, 2010; Aldrich, 2012; Cuaton & Su, 2020b; Tan-Mullins et al., 2020) . To that end, the Tacloban City government must thoroughly examine and confront the inferior quality of resettlement houses and the lack of survivor inputs to decisions that affect their lives. Most importantly, the local government should also scrutinize the unintended consequences of their past decisions to ensure that future risk management does not (re)create and/or exacerbate peoples' everyday challenges (Ensor et al., 2021; Kelman, 2020; Tuhkanen et al., 2018) .

To our knowledge, this study is the first to report Typhoon Haiyan survivors' challenges amidst the current Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings may help policymakers and development program implementers better understand the Haiyan survivors' issues and challenges so that J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f government and private institutions may plan and execute post-pandemic programs responsively.

However, like in any other exploratory qualitative study, this paper has limitations. We want to highlight two of these. This research did not receive any ethics approval from the first author's Internal Review Board due to the absence of such a mechanism in the first author's institution at the time of data gathering. However, proper ethical practices involving human research participants have been observed in gathering data for this paper. The second author contributed in terms of the in-depth and formal analysis and rigorous writing of this paper. Second, we acknowledge that our findings are heavily reliant on the inputs of key informants to whom we have access. Our data, thus, may fail to reveal the depth and degree of how our identified challenges-and equally, if not more important, are the challenges we were unable to unraveldifferentially impact each Haiyan survivor or household in Tacloban North, Philippines. Further studies, therefore, need to be conducted to address these gaps.

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We are grateful to our key informants who participated, shared their stories, and gave their time for this study despite the risks and challenges from the pandemic.

The authors declare no conflict of interest in this study.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.