菲律賓超級颱風釀慘劇 女兒哀求媽媽放手

44歲的菲律賓高中教師貝爾納黛特·特內格拉永遠不會忘記她女兒最後的話。

“媽媽，放手吧……救你自己。”這是特內格拉的女兒在廢墟中留給母親的話，她的身體被倒塌房屋的木頭碎片刺中。

特內格拉的臉痛苦地扭曲着：“我當時緊抓着她，不斷告訴她堅持下去，我將把她救出來。但她放棄了。”

8日，特大臺風“海燕”突襲菲律賓萊特省塔克洛班，橫掃特內格拉在河邊的家，釀造了這起人間悲劇。特內格拉一家擠在棚屋中，原以爲會度過難關，但洪水水位以驚人速度上升，房子倒了，屋裏的人也被席捲而去，包括特內格拉的丈夫和另一個女兒。他們掙扎着撤至安全地帶，但小女兒卻困在激流中。

衆多失去親人的人傷心欲絕。一個滿臉淚水的男子使勁搖頭，不相信這個事實，不斷地說着“不是他”。兩個十幾歲的男孩在父親的遺體邊放聲痛哭。

至今，很多幸存者仍在震驚不已，他們從沒經歷過如此強烈的颱風。

High school teacher Bernadette Tenegra, 44, would never forget the last words of her daughter.

“Ma, just let go. Save yourself,” said the girl, whose body was pierced by wooden splinters from houses crushed by Supertyphoon “Yolanda.”

“I was holding her and I kept telling her to hang on, that I was going to bring her up. But she just gave up,” said Tenegra, her face contorted in grief.

People with missing relatives tentatively approached each one, peeking at the faces. One tearful man shook his head, muttering, “Not him.” Two teenage boys openly wept when they found what they were looking for: the body of their dead father.

The Tenegra family had huddled together in their shanty at Barangay (village) 66-Paseo de Legazpi, believing it could weather the storm as it had always done in the past.

But as the water rose with astonishing speed, the house toppled over, sweeping away the occupants, including Tenegra’s husband and her other daughter. They were able to scramble to safety, but the youngest Tenegra was spun around by the current along with the deadly debris.

“I crawled over to her, and I tried to pull her up. But she was too weak. It seemed she had already given up,” the mother said.

“And then I just let go,” she said, crying.

Mute shock was etched on the faces of survivors, many of whom were unfamiliar with storms as fierce as this one.

Richard Bilisario, an Air Force man, was carried by violent waves that demolished his unit’s barracks at the military base overlooking the Leyte Gulf.

“At first, the wind was only coming from inland, so we didn’t really mind it. Then suddenly we heard the howling from the sea,” he recalled.

“When we opened the door to check, the water was already up to the knee. And as soon as the door was opened, the water just rushed in, and the 11 of us were thrown away,” he said.

Four are still missing, including their commander, Bilisario said.

At downtown Tacloban, two men silently pushed a wooden cart carrying the bloated bodies of a woman, her teenage son and her baby on the flooded main avenue.

The men took their gruesome load through the streets, as kibitzers watched in morbid fascination.

The woman’s name was Erlinda Mingig, 48, a fish vendor. She had been trapped in her one-story home with her two children, John Mark, 12, and 1-year-old Jenelyn, at Barangay 39-Calvaryhill.

“I told them to stay in the house because it was safer,” said Mingig’s husband, Rogelio, 48.

But the water was rising dangerously fast. When Erlinda tried to open the door to escape, it would not budge,” the man said.

“We found her embracing the children in one arm and grabbing on to the ceiling with the other,” he said.

Some of the bereaved expressed conflicted feelings of guilt: Why they survived, and why their loved ones didn’t. And in at least one case, why they had been able to save others, but not their own.

Reinfredo Celis, chair of Barangay 31-Pampango, spent most of Thursday and early Friday morning transporting his neighbors to a sturdy school building downtown, on his multipurpose cab.

But he didn’t even consider evacuating his own wife, believing they were safe in their concrete two-story house. He was mistaken.

Businessman Lemuel Honor, a former vice mayor of a Southern Leyte town, said Tacloban had been swamped by two different bodies of water.

“Two seas actually met over Tacloban: the Cancabato Bay and the Tacloban Bay,” he said.

The first wave of the calamity came when Yolanda barreled inland from the Pacific Ocean via the Tacloban Bay, and the second, when its tail pulled in waves from the Cancabato Bay in the opposite direction, he said.

“This is why you’d be confused why there were waves coming from both directions, first westward, then eastward,” Honor said.