Typhoon Haiyan, classed as a super-typhoon killed more than 5,200 people in its path across the Philippines. The category five equivalent storm with one-minute sustained winds of 196 miles per hour (315k/hr.) was the strongest cyclone to make landfall on record surpassing the 190 miles per hour sustained winds of Atlantic hurricane Camillein in 1969. Haiyan was one of the deadliest natural disasters ever for the Philippines and the deadliest typhoon ever to hit the country, a nation prone to typhoons. Four million people are estimated to be homeless, while lack of food and other basic necessities is creating more difficulties.
More than 1,600 people are still unaccounted for and the body count is still expected to climb. The typhoon, with some of the strongest winds ever recorded generated tsunami-like storm surges and flattened dozens of towns across the central Philippines on November 8, 2013. Hardest hit Tacloban, capital city of Leyte, was catastrophically destroyed. The only more deadly natural disaster in the Philippines was a tsunami 1976 that killed between 5,000 and 8,000 people.
The super-typhoon was devastating to coconut farmers. Coconut plantations in Leyte, Cebu and Negros islands took a beating as they were pounded by the storm. One of the world’s largest producers of coconuts lost thousands of trees to Typhoon Haiyan and the industry in some regions could take a decade to recover. It could take some species 10 years to produce again, while others three to five years.
Coconut exports average $1.5 billion annually and the Philippines ranks second in exports world-wide behind Indonesia. An estimated 15 million coconut trees out of a nationwide total of 300 million trees were destroyed. More than 41,000 hectares (more than 100,000 acres) were affected in six provinces by the storm. Though many of the farms will recover, the damage has been enormous.
Coconut trees rarely lose battles with typhoons because of the way they are structured. But in the hardest hit areas, there are many tree casualties as trees everywhere are toppled or uprooted. Eighty percent of the people in the hardest hit islands are dependent on the coconut industry for a livelihood.
“Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of unprepared souls. He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows… While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies, he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation. Even now he is at work. In accidents and calamities by sea and by land, in great conflagrations, in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms, in tempests, floods, cyclones, tidal waves, and earthquakes, in every place and in a thousand forms, Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. Destruction will be upon both man and beast. ‘The earth mourneth and fadeth away,’ ‘The haughty people . . . do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.’ Isaiah 24:4, 5” Great Controversy, page 589.