it is the scale of devastation that is hampering relief efforts... coastal villages swept away, buildings, roads & airports destroyed or buried under debris over at least three large islands and who knows yet how many square miles affected... logistics is the main issue now.

everything must be brought in from elsewhere... and where do you go first - they all need help.

ships can bring in supplies to the coast... but first they have to be loaded with supplies - that must be bought, if not already part of emergency response supplies - and to do that they must go into ports, be loaded up and then leave. And I believe that they already have to import rice, so given what has been lost, just how much is there available within the nation?

Just a short first hand observation - in 1972, during Hurricane Agnes, I was working on a small farm in western NY. thankfully, we were up on a hill not down in the valley - so we were an island for 3 days. No way on or off until the water receeded enough to clear the roads. No phone or electricity after the first morning. We cooked on the charcoal grill & had plenty of food. The worst that happened was that we were plenty wet and lost a brood mare to the flood. Others were no so lucky.   What happened to the Philipines is magnitudes greater than what I endured, so the issue of logistics is that much greater. It's an sad fact of life that international relief organizations face with every large scale disaster.