Day one: Friday 8 November

It was 4am when Clarence Cherreguine was awoken by a persistent wind. The lawyer, who lived a few metres from the sea, had experienced countless typhoons, and he hunkered down for what he thought would be just another storm passing through the pretty coastal town of Balangkayan, on the eastern coast of Samar island in the central Philippines. He was wrong.

“It wasn’t just the wind this time,” he said from the remnants of his front porch five days later. “It was the waves.”

As light broke across the town, the grey morning mist morphed into a swirling cloud of pressurised air that could be heard wailing for miles up and down the coast, soon followed by waves as high as six metres (20ft) pummelling the island’s coastline. Coupled with gales of 195mph, the water would leave a trail of destruction never before seen in the Philippines. Within hours, much of Samar island and its neighbour Leyte – the two regions hardest hit by Haiyan – would devastated as corrugated iron roofs were torn off buildings, snapped palm trees slammed into shops, cars were flung against hotels and pylons danced in the storm like heavy marionnettes.

Many residents, expecting the storm to hit a few hours later than it did, were caught unawares when it made landfall in the southern town of Guiuan at 4.40am, said Aurora de los Reyes, a civil servant who survived by running from room to room in her house with her mother and daughter, escaping flying bits of debris.

“Most of the dead were found in their homes,” she said. “It came so early that a lot of people were caught off guard and were still sleeping.”

Experts tracking Haiyan – the typhoon that would come to be known as the strongest in recorded history – had noted its peculiar force as it whipped up in the south Pacific around Tahiti and barrelled its way west. They warned that the typhoon’s strength could blow the roofs off even the most storm-proof buildings and suck out their walls, with some foretelling “catastrophic damage” as Haiyan – known locally as Yolanda – ravaged the Philippines’ agricultural central islands.

Some 100 miles west of Guiuan in Tacloban, the provincial capital of Leyte province, the city’s young mayor Alfred Romualdez was patrolling the coastline when a blast of wind and water threw him to the ground.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guiuan, the first place hit by typhoon Haiyan

“I couldn’t see it coming because the wind was so strong. We just took cover. Glass shattered. People grabbed me and took me into a building but within 10 minutes the doors had blasted open and water was everywhere. Someone punched a hole in the ceiling and we climbed out. I stood behind a thick post and the wind was just blowing. Imagine you’re standing behind a jet engine that’s about to take off and all you hear is that roaring sound.”

Romualdez was on foot when the eight-metre (25ft) storm surge broke on to the pavements and houses, creating a two-storey tidal wave that obliterated everything in its path. At Tacloban’s airport, which sits on a low-lying peninsula facing the city, the wind flung rows of seats through walls and blasted glass windows on to the tarmac. Those caught in the storm’s wrath were thrown through the air and swept away by the tides.

“It was like a nuclear bomb struck us,” said Henry Afable of Maydolong, a little town lying just north of Balangkayan in Samar.

Haiyan went on to make four more landfalls across the Philippines, each devastating in their own right. In Bogo, northern Cebu, thousands of residents had taken refuge in the blue-roofed sports complex, where they set themselves up a few days before the storm’s planned arrival with catering and card games.

“But the wind started howling and the rain started coming, and soon the babies and the children were screaming that the roof was going to blow off,” said the mayor, Celestino Martinez. “I was trying to tell people to be calm. I had to shout over the noise, saying: ‘No don’t worry, the roof won’t blow off, the panels are too big.’ But they did blow off, piece by piece.

“People were hysterical, running around trying to avoid the water. You should have seen the small children, the old women, the grandfathers – the panic on their faces. I ended up holing myself up in the ladies’ bathroom with nine other evacuees, waiting until the thing passed.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mass burial preparations in Tacloban

Hours later, after typhoon Haiyan had made its way to another one of the Philippines’ central islands, Cherreguine found that his sturdy concrete house – once set back from the shore behind two rows of houses – had become a beachfront property.

Romualdez went looking for his family, all of whom had been in a car when the storm surge swept through Tacloban’s streets. After searching frantically among the rubble and debris of his city, he said, “I found them, clinging to a post.”

Day two

When dawn broke on Saturday, the great roving eye of the storm had largely passed into Vietnamese waters on its way to China. It was in the calm of the next day that many realised just what damage the storm had wrought. Debris of every type and size lined the streets of cities and villages, although it was Tacloban, where the storm surge hit hardest, that bore the brunt of the typhoon. There, the bodies of men and women, caught up by the tidal wave, lay discarded among the rubble like oversized dolls, their arms outstretched as if to shield themselves from the storm.

Although TV and radio warnings had been broadcast regularly, along with updates on social media, and more than 750,000 people had been evacuated across the Philippines, many in the most vulnerable areas believed they could withstand the storm. Some officials, including Guiuan’s mayor, had ordered mandatory evacuations, knowing residents would try to stick out the storm. Others had asked police to fire into the air to force people out of their homes.

Speaking to the Guardian four days after the typhoon ravaged his city, Guiuan’s mayor, Christopher Gonzales, was fighting fatigue and low morale, the bags under his eyes showing his stress. “It’s been a complete wipeout here. I don’t eat because I’m worried if I eat it will decrease my intensity to be able to help. I’m trying my best, but I’m not superman – I can’t do everything.”

Survivors scavenged for food and looked for loved ones as the full scale of the devastation became clear. Tacloban – normally a town of 220,000 – was a mess of debris, its buildings reduced to rubble, its main evacuation centre having turned into a death trap when a flood of water surged through its halls.

The Philippines sees about 20 typhoons annually, and this was the second category-5 storm to strike this year. Last year, typhoon Bopha killed more than 1,100 people and caused $1bn of damage. But still, the government seemed ill-prepared to deal with the crisis.

“Now, looking back, the preparations were not enough, especially in Tacloban,” Lucille Sering of the government’s climate change commission told Reuters. “What we did not prepare for was the breakdown in local functions.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Haiyan survivors desperate for food

Day three

By Sunday, the severity of the crisis was becoming clear. One government official estimated that 10,000 people had been killed by Haiyan in Leyte province alone. Communications and electricity were still down across vast swaths of the provinces affected, making it difficult to understand just how widespread, or how awful, the damage really was.

Airports and harbours were entirely closed or badly disrupted, forcing emergency teams to try to reach survivors by foot – in many cases scrambling over debris hours at a time in order to access remote and ravaged neighbourhoods.

Boxes of aid were piled up next to army backpacks on the runway at Manila’s Villamor air force base, where hundreds of soldiers were making their way on to C-130 planes for deployment. Security was beginning to become a major concern in Tacloban amid reports of looting and violence. Colonel Miguel Okol of the air force said aid would just have to wait. “Our priority right now is sending out PNP [Philippines national police] …"|

Day four

The relief effort was gathering momentum, but it was too slow. International aid workers said an earthquake on the neighbouring island of Bohol in October had depleted resources and hampered efforts to get aid into the low-lying area before the storm struck.

The president, Benigno Aquino, played down the 10,000 figure and attributed it to an “emotional” governor upset by the traumatic events. That governor has since been fired from his post amid a very public back-and-forth between international estimates and the official government death toll. The figure, as of late on Friday local time, was 3,631.

“That’s just not right. It’s not even possible,” said Jim Eastwood, a bright-blue-eyed man from Brighton with a shock of white hair who fled his devastated home in Palo, just south of Tacloban, after a tidal wave of water slammed through his front door, forcing a load of debris into the house, slicing open his calf and breaking his foot in the swirling mix of storm and seawater. “I’ve seen at least 2,000 just on my way into Tacloban airport – the street is littered with bodies.”

Eastwood weaved his way through streets strewn with pylons, car parts, roofing, wooden debris and bodies to get to Tacloban. “The people were like ants – they were everywhere, stealing everything, grabbing stuff. Every shop I saw was being pinched. Some of them had machetes and others had guns.”

Criticism at both local and international levels rained down on the Philippine government for acting too slowly. “Nobody imagined the magnitude [of the disaster] this super-typhoon brought on us,” Aquino said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest US says typhoon victims are receiving aid

Day five

On the Tuesday after the storm ravaged Leyte, the security situation in the province was declining rapidly. In Tacloban, a 13-year-old boy was knifed in neck and stomach. A PRC convoy was ambushed. Eight people were killed storming a rice warehouse in Alangalang.

The Tacloban mayor, Romualdez, held the first mass burial, with officials promising that they had taken all measures to identify the bodies.

After dusk, the streets were plunged into a velvety darkness. Here and there a flicker of light would emerge through the debris as a survivor lit up a candle, while back in the shadows the silhouettes of body bags came into view. It was desolate, apocalyptic and fetid.

Day six

Amid growing desperation among the population – including fears of widespread violence as hungry survivors continued to search destroyed homes for food – aid reached the region in the form of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington and its 5,000-strong crew. Moored off eastern Samar, the US navy unloaded pallets of food and water for delivery in Tacloban and Guiuan.

While aid was being taken off the military cargo planes arriving that were regularly at the airport, street-sellers were setting themselves up among the shanties of Tacloban, where black water fizzled beneath wobbly planks of wood and corrugated-iron shacks, partially blown over by the wind but somehow still standing. A handful of makeshift stands peddled chicken adobo, a favourite among Filipinos, but the raw meat looked grey and spoiled.

Jocel Espedilla, 32, a wiry man with a skinny face, scanned the list of the dead at Tacloban’s city hall, where the stench of some 300 people still waiting to be buried wafted up from the hill below. On a different island when Haiyan hit, he said the agony of not knowing what had happened to his family was too much to bear.

“I live in Cebu, but my wife and four-year-old son live in San Jose, right near the airport of Tacloban.

“When I heard the storm [had hit Tacloban] I had to find out they were OK. I went online and checked all the links where I could see the names of survivors and I went around the city to different TV stations to see if they had any lists. I was going crazy.

“I waited for three days to take a military C-130 to Tacloban. I really couldn’t wait any longer so I decided to take a ferry to Ormoc. From there I took a bus, just hoping and praying, hoping and praying. On the ride all I could see was destruction, so I was getting more and more scared as I approached Tacloban. When I got to San Jose, there were dead bodies everywhere. Many of them weren’t covered. Have you ever seen a roasted pig? It’s something like that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aid agencies face distribution problems in Tacloban

Days seven and eight, Thursday and Friday 14 and 15 November

Confusion over the death toll continued to swirl on Friday, with the government number standing at 3,621 on Friday. But the Philippines interior secretary Mar Roxas said the official toll was 3,422, while a notice at city hall in Tacloban estimated 4,000. The United Nations had the highest figure for the overall dead, at 4,460.

Even the UN aid chief Valerie Amos, who visited Tacloban on Thursday, described the distribution of aid as “far too slow” and said people had been let down by relief not coming in more quickly.

The city’s administrator, Tecson Lim, estimated that only a fifth of Tacloban’s residents were receiving any aid, with most of it piling up at the airport. Evacuation centres such as the Astrodome, where thousands of survivors were huddled together in abysmal conditions, had still not seen food aid, and it was unclear when it would arrive.

Lack of manpower and heavy machinery meant that supplies such as trucks were in short supply and had to be used for very different but equally important jobs.

The mayor, Romualdez, explained why the destruction had been so great: “The water came from the Pacific and went over the whole peninsula, into the bay. That’s why there are houses and cars in the bay. The barangay [neighbourhood] in that peninsula is the biggest one in the city and 95% of its houses are made of light materials. That’s why when the water hit, it got all that rubble and all those people. There are bodies all over. All the ones you see on the road were retrieved because they were seen. We haven’t even gone into the debris. We haven’t gone into the villages.”

A severe lack of manpower and heavy machinery was holding back relief efforts. “We need more people on the ground. We don’t have enough trucks,” he said, frustrated. “We can’t use one truck to carry cadavers in the morning and then food aid in the evening. Even just for carrying bodies, it takes two or three people to carry, especially if the bodies have been decaying for a few days – they are very heavy. What’s worrying is that we’re getting reports from different barangay who say there are 20 bodies and we get there and find there are 30.”

Christie Laga, a petite woman in her late 20s, waited out the last few days of her pregnancy on a plastic chair in the partially destroyed Tacloban hospital, along with four other heavily pregnant women, with an intravenous drip in her arm.

“I was at home with my husband when suddenly the water just gushed in, all the way up to my waist,” she said. “I knew I had to get out to save my baby. I climbed up on to the roof of our house and jumped over to the next building, where my friend lives, and took refuge there. I was warned I would lose the baby and was so worried. I kept rubbing my stomach, saying it would be all right. Since the storm, I haven’t been able to sleep or eat. I know it’s a girl, but I don’t know what to name her. Maybe I’ll name her Yolanda,” she said, then added: “I’m joking, of course.”

Thousands of people were still queuing at the airport to escape the desperate chaos of their city even as they lamented the destruction the typhoon had wreaked on their island.

“This place used to be so beautiful,” said Guiuan’s De los Reyes as she surveyed the first shipments of aid coming into the town by military plane. “The day after the storm hit I walked from my house to the municipal hall and just cried the whole way, seeing all the destruction.”

Additional reporting: Tania Branigan and Aya Lowe in Tacloban