it takes a while to really understand what you re looking at. just the block after block of devastation. and that storm surge which carried with it so much debris, so much wood, corrugated tin from people s homes. so much just piled up on the streets, which makes it extremely difficult to distribute the aid. the number of fatalities, we don t know. the focus is on the living right now, focusing on their needs, food and water, most of them. and trying to get medical care to those who have been injured by some of the debris, the water and the collapsing buildings. i wanted to talk to the mayor of tacloban who we spoke to in our previous hour. he actually survived by having to climb onto his roof. this is my conversation with the mayor.
in order to get fed, good food and water. at some point there s a lot of people who can t even make it this far to get to the airport. as you can see, another driving rain has now picked up, which is the last thing people here need. people are sleeping out. people don t have shelters. they re not they re sleeping under corrugated tin, what they can salvage from the wreckage. some of it they ve already used, what little tin they had to cover the body of their husband, churn or wives which have been left out. you can smell in a lot of the neighborhoods you go in, you can smell where people have died. because they re not being collected. they re just left to lay out. anderson, i don t want to leave you out in the weather there. thank you for the reporting. obviously we ll watch you tonight and throughout the day. good luck with the reporting on the ground there. certainly the mess hajj has to get out. thank you for joining us this morning. anderson s show is ac 360 airing live from
nightmare. reporter: well, yeah. as sanjay said, often those concerns about secondary disease from bodies, that s often overstated. but there certainly, there s a lot of walking wounded. and you certainly see a lot of fatalities here. i ve seen probably 15 or so just in a two hour walk in the surrounding area from where i am. and there are people actively searching for their entire families who they saw swept away and they know are dead. they just simply can t find the bodies. and they re not getting any help in that search. it s mothers looking for their dead children all by themselves, wandering around, trying to lift up branches, corrugated tin to see if their child is buried underneath. has power been restored to those areas? are people able to make phone calls? are cell phones working? reporter: no. no. there s no cell service. there s no power. you know, some, the philippine
i was thinking about roman times when the demonstrators created this shield made out of corrugated tin or steel as they advanced toward the museum. i m trying to get an answer, and if anybody knows the answer to this, join in. the american young american men working as a medic, he was able to leave the square. do we know if the anti-mubarak protestors, if new ones can come into the square? no, actually i was just to the south of the square, as it was building up just before it went dark. and the army was quite firm. you could leave, but you could not go back. nobody was allowed to enter the square. so those who leave the square cannot come back.
reporter: they ve been preparing basically since the fighting began, anderson. they ve been digging up, as you saw in that report, digging up stones to use for ammunition. barricading the entrances to this place and trying to keep morale up, swearing they re going to fight back. the sound of the picks digging into the asphalt all night, it s uncanny, as well as the sound of the wounded and the prayers. i can only compare it to perhaps a medieval siege would have sounded like around a castle. i was thinking about roman times when the demonstrators created this shield made out of corrugated tin or steel as they advanced toward the museum. i m trying to get an answer, and if anybody knows the answer to this, join in.