Officials had issued warnings that the storm would be extraordinarily powerful before Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines, according to United Nations.
Jerry Valezquez, official from United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) said Manila Observatory had warned the public only 3 days before the disaster.
Speaking at the press conference held at UN office in Geneva, Valezquez said Philippines did not pay attention to early warnings because they were not expecting that the devastation would be this overwhelming, also because typhoons are very common in the country.
Valezquez reminded that the last typhoon disaster swept away the country in 2006, claiming the lives of 7,000 victims.
He stressed that one of the reasons why the death toll was this massive was that the buildings near the shore were not solid enough to resist a disaster in such scale.
- 800,000 people left homeless
Meanwhile, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesman Adrian Edwards said the typhoon left more than 800,000 people homeless and there was still a high risk of flood in the disaster area.
Edwards also remarked that thousands of homeless people were now in a dire need of food, drinking water, medicine, cloth and blanket.
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